How does Prometheus work?
“Prometheus” is issued for 7 days, but you can receive it an unlimited number of times. If your community received it at least once, then it can be found in the “Pantheon of Authors” on the “VKontakte with Authors” page.
One of the main advantages of the algorithm is that it takes user actions into account very carefully. For example, if you saw an interesting post in the recommendations, then subscribed to the community, but then stopped following its news, this will affect its popularity.
Prometheus can also promote you to a less obvious audience and will monitor how they react to an atypical post. Agree, it doesn’t always make sense to show news from only one industry to a specific user in recommendations. But for the most part, the algorithm delivers impressions to audiences interested in similar communities.
Thus, it replaces targeted advertising and advertising in communities absolutely free of charge.
What is it needed for?
Imagine that you have worked on your page and received the Prometheus badge in VK. What will it give you as an author and why is it interesting as a reader?
You are the Author
First of all, this is expanding the audience of your readers. And the most important thing is that your materials will be shown to exactly those people who are interested in your topic. That is, if you do airbrushing on rims and post your work on a social network, those who are interested will see it. And not stamp collectors, for example. All you have to do is get users interested in your work. And you will have a whole week for this, at least. And then, who knows, perhaps you will receive the badge again.
This mark is recognition of your talent. And this should undoubtedly become a source of pride for you that out of millions of users, the robot chose you.
Another interesting “bunion” is a bot teacher. He will tell you how to promote your page quickly and at the lowest cost. After all, he is familiar with all VKontakte users and knows everything about them.
You are the Reader
For the reader, the fire of Prometheus on VKontakte is an algorithm for high-quality selection of materials that will be of interest to you. The principle of “getting to know” the user is as follows:
- Interests. The robot remembers everything:
- which page did you stay on for longer than usual?
- what do you write about yourself;
- where do you like;
- In addition, the robot will even remember the time at which you most often view posts on a certain topic. And he will helpfully slip similar ones at the same time.
- The recording itself. The second parameter that the system checks is content. Quality, uniqueness, relevance and correspondence of the photo/video to the text of the post. And also the reaction of readers. The more readers stop at a post and then look at the entire page, the more likely it is that the profile will receive the Promethean light. This means that only really interesting posts will be included in the recommendations.
Please note that the topic of the profile does not matter (if these are not posts on the topic 18+, they will never be included in the recommendations). Among the authors marked with a light there is even a school teacher.
How to get the Prometheus Mark?
Original content
Most publications should contain unique text, images and videos that are not available on other sites. Rewriting and reposting are not welcome here; images must be of good quality, and videos must be uploaded directly to Vkontakte (and not through a link, for example from YouTube).
This even has a certain advantage - the video in VK automatically plays when scrolling, unlike one downloaded from YouTube.
Also, don't limit yourself to just photos and videos, create personalized music selections and gifs.
As for content from third-party sites, you can also share it, but do not overdo it and it is advisable to add your opinion.
Attention! We are not talking about the number of subscribers, because Prometheus actually encourages authors who have not yet been promoted. You must have real and not fake likes, reposts and comments.
Even if you have few subscribers, but they are very active, this is a big plus. VKontakte has already learned to recognize bots, so you need to work hard. Ask questions, ask for advice, raise controversial topics and respond to comments.
Prometheus will appreciate the virality of your content, i.e. how often people share it with their friends and return to the recording themselves.
3. Convenient design
Don't forget about the readability of your posts. Divide the text into paragraphs, follow punctuation and check spelling.
In addition, you need to follow the rules of the VKontakte social network itself. Read the rules for placing advertising publications and the rules for holding competitions and promotions.
Artificial Intelligence technologies are developing at a very high pace, and already now your VKontakte page is periodically subjected to AI analysis.
VK developers have created a mechanism that sorts content among all users, and rewards the most interesting and unique authors with a “fire”
next to the name. If you notice such an icon on a user or group, you can rest assured that this user or community creates original, high-quality material.
"Prometheus"
was designed specifically to support users posting new and exciting material. Thus, the sign of “fire” is issued for 7 days, but you can receive it an unlimited number of times. In addition, if you have already become the happy owner of a mark, the Prometheus mechanism will remember you. The AI will scan your page more often and evaluate your chances of being re-promoted to the TOP.
“Prometheus” is regularly improved. Each time he selects materials more carefully, compares them and distributes the treasured tags. In the mobile version of VK “Prometheus” will show your content to people who are not familiar with your work, but who may be interested in it.
VKontakte greatly values its users, and especially those who post their own content on the site’s pages. According to representatives of social networks - “Without the people who have been filling the site with stories and creativity for 11 years, VKontakte would be a collection of code and graphics.”
The developers understand perfectly well who makes their network so popular, and do their best to support such authors. The Prometheus algorithm includes a mechanism for “protecting the original source.” This means that “Prometheus” sees unique material uploaded directly to VK. If you post content on other resources and then copy it to a contact, Prometheus will ignore you. Also, AI cannot check material using external links.
Both the author’s personal page and the page of any community can receive the distinction. The rules for getting a spark are the same for everyone. In order for “Prometheus” to pay attention to you, you must adhere to the following rules that were incorporated into the algorithm when it was created:
The first, and perhaps most important, is uniqueness.
Generate only unique content. Post your own photos, share stories, upload videos directly to VK. Conduct streams and other live broadcasts. Regularly update your posts and post something that is not yet within the visibility of the Prometheus system. Let us remind you that the algorithm only works on the VKontakte network at the moment.
You also need to monitor the quality of the material being laid out.
Here we must take the information literally. That is, a video with 1080 quality will be marked by the AI as more interesting than the same video, but with a quality of 720px. One of a kind images in high quality. Personal music selections. “Prometheus” also looks at the design of your text; it is recommended to divide the text into paragraphs, follow the rules of punctuation and spelling. In addition, the algorithm contains the rules of the VKontakte network. Thus, if you violate the rules of VK, or the rules for placing advertisements, your chances of receiving a tag will be significantly lower.
The third thing that the algorithm developers advise is to remain yourself.
You should not copy popular material and simply remake it in your own way. “Prometheus” will easily recognize your intention and give the mark to someone else. Be yourself. Do what you like and the algorithm will not leave you unattended.
What is algorithm VKontakte
The social network VKontakte is the most popular in Russia, and one of the 10 most widespread in the world. As of June 2018, the number of registered accounts is approaching 492 million. Over 5 billion messages are published daily. Once a person subscribes to certain groups or topics, he will receive materials from them in the form of recommendations in the news feed.
As activity increases and the number of publications grows, it becomes difficult to view everything. At the same time, when reading recommended materials (or commercial ones, which also appear in the feed), it does not come to new ones at all. Although there are a lot of other really cool materials. A kind of “information bubble” is formed - familiar content or commercial content (promoted for money) predominates.
Finding and helping to promote interesting, creative and talented authors is one of the goals of implementing the algorithm. It was launched in September 2021 and has largely revolutionized the way this social network operates.
This is an artificially created intelligence that provides the mechanics of searching for interesting authors and communities by machines and neural networks. He analyzes new content and looks for materials that have attracted the attention of the audience. Their authors or communities receive a special mark from the network on their publications - “Prometheus fire”. She looks like this:
The “Prometheus” fire of VK was named by analogy with the ancient Greek myth about the titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to people. This stable phrase has become customary to denote the desire for high achievements in various areas of life. Fire is a symbol of the dignity and greatness of man and his deeds. Likewise, the creators of the social network using the VK algorithm celebrate outstanding materials and give their users the opportunity to get acquainted with them. Essentially, this is an improved function for the appearance of material on the tape, something like the most interesting thing first.
Previously, recommendations on what to watch were formed by two main parameters:
- Speed of gaining likes (the faster, the more popular the material was considered).
- Interests of friends - the recommendations included the material that friends on the service read or watched. Considering that the speed and number of friends (especially if there are a lot of them) have a very mediocre relationship to what is interesting to you, the result was so-so. A lot of offers and content of dubious value to you.
VKontakte and the algorithm took a completely different path. Recommendations appear in the feed that are not from familiar groups and have nothing to do with friends. These may or may not be commercial materials. The important thing is that the updated VK feed recommends watching something new, based solely on the interests of a particular user.
What does Prometheus give?
The algorithm allows authors to gain more benefit from posting their material on VKontakte. Thanks to the “Recommendations” section, your work will be displayed to more people. At the same time, only to those who may be interested in your content. If you write about a cryptocurrency business, the system will not show it to women over 50, but will actively discard your post to young people who are interested in bitcoins. Prometheus technology allows you to increase your audience reach and attract new subscribers. If before you had to declare yourself, and in addition to generating content, you also had to spend time and money on PR. Now “Prometheus” is ready to take on part of this work.
In addition to additional coverage, users highlighted with a fire mark receive support from a 24-hour bot consultant. This is a specially trained robot that will tell you how best to interact with the audience, how to correctly use the tools provided in VK. The developers guarantee dynamic changes in community statistics after communicating with such a bot. By the way, if you want to increase your VKontakte sales, I recommend that you watch the video “”.
Evgenia Kryukova
We asked representatives of the VKontakte team some burning questions about Prometheus, smart tape and their plans for the future. Answered by Sergey Paranko, director of media ecosystem, and Andrey Zakonov, director of growth and research of the social network. Hurry up to get acquainted with unique information from the original source.
1. How do your algorithms understand that a post is interesting to a specific user? Can you list the factors that most influence the reach of a post? The quality of the content, the response from the audience - this is clear. Anything less obvious?
We analyze the user's activity in the feed and raise higher those posts with which he is more likely to interact: like, write a comment, stick, open a photo, read an article, watch a video. These actions are very different, we predict them separately. Next, all this is taken into account by a general algorithm, which, based on all factors, performs ranking.
2. At your speech at “
MEN2
” you said that even little things such as the weather and the user’s mood affect the reach of a post. How does the tape understand this?
Behind any post there is a huge number of ranking indicators. Each component is a certain value that describes the post itself, its author, the time of day at the time of viewing the recommendations, the speed of the reader’s Internet connection and many other criteria.
If a user visited the news feed or recommendations section while in a deep forest and with a poor Internet connection, we will not show him a bulky video at the beginning of the feed. The algorithm also takes into account the day of the week and time of day. This way, the morning recommendations feed will contain more news and information content, and in the evening - media and entertainment content.
3. Do you have a document that lists all the factors that the algorithm takes into account? Or has he already become so trained that even you don’t know by what parameters he provides coverage for a particular record?
We know the list of factors, but everything is unique for each user-record pair. Therefore, just by looking at a post, it is impossible to say how good it is, it’s subjective. A post about local news from Moscow in St. Petersburg is absolutely irrelevant to me, and you may not be interested in my news feed about machine learning and social networks.
4. Is it possible to artificially increase the reach of a post by purchasing likes and shares on promotion services?
Not worth it. In the long run, this will definitely lead to lower coverage. In addition to the fact that likes and shares do not play a central role in the ranking of a post, such cheats are highly likely to be detected by us.
However, traffic to a post from references on other social networks can indeed improve the organic reach of a post, and there is no penalty for this.
5. Is there an optimal text length for maximum reach in the smart feed? For example, in the announcement of an article - no more than 500 characters. And in a longread created in the editor, there are no more than 10,000?
There is no optimal length apart from the reader's focus. Everything is based on involvement; if you have an informational message, try to write succinctly, in an information style. If you are trying to attract a person to click on a snippet, the same principle is succinct and engaging. Just don’t fall into clickbait, it will negatively affect your reach.
If you're telling a story, captivate the person. All large forms, typically more than 1,000 characters, are best typed in the article editor, breaking up the text with multimedia inserts.
6. Smart Feed favors high-quality videos (over low-quality ones). What is “high-quality video” for VKontakte? What characteristics does it have?
Videos 720–1080 rub.
7. Does VK try to detect fake news? Is the veracity and reliability of the data important, or only the audience's interest in the recording?
On VKontakte there is no pre-moderation of content - as on other platforms, users can freely publish and discuss topics that interest them. At the same time, anyone can report illegal, offensive or inaccurate content in their opinion using the “Complain” button. We consider all complaints without exception. VKontakte has one of the largest moderation services and we respond as quickly as possible.
8. How do you feel about competitions for the most active subscribers and competitions for subscription + repost? They are allowed by the VK rules, but does this somehow affect the coverage of posts (positively or negatively)? Do you recommend using competitions for promotion in VK?
This is a legal way of promotion, but you need to keep in mind that in this way you are attracting an irrelevant audience to your subscribers. This can have a negative side effect—followers who don't engage with your group's main content can have a negative impact on the reach and virality of your posts.
9. Articles created in the editor receive more coverage than articles leading to a third-party site. What should commercial sites and blogs do in such conditions? How can they attract VKontakte users to their site?
A business group on any social network is first and foremost a community. If you treat it exactly like a media asset, you will succeed. Forcing a user to another site, without providing an alternative, in communication can upset a person. As they say: you want to sell me your product, but you do it without respect.
On the VK platform you can communicate with clients/readers, sell goods, receive money transfers and much more. We are developing our ecosystem and making it as convenient as possible for users. And in this regard, it is also beneficial for a business to develop its site within VK. The article editor is another tool for communication and community building.
10. Will wiki articles now receive less coverage than editor-based articles?
It's not the format that decides, but the user's interaction with your content. An interesting story told with a lot of interaction from readers will receive coverage regardless of the presentation format. Another thing is that it is more convenient to hold the audience’s attention with the tools available in the article editor.
Specifically about wiki pages, they do not fall into the “Recommendations” section on mobile devices, they are basically a desktop tool, so yes, their reach is lower than that of other delivery formats.
11. Some users complain that they do not see interesting and necessary posts. Why is this happening? And do you have any thoughts about following the Facebook path
- making sure that users’ feeds contain more personal content rather than commercial ones?
We are constantly experimenting with different ranking models, and the main metric is user engagement. You can always send clear signals to the neuron by hiding a couple of posts from unwanted public pages.
12. You say that you cannot purchase bots at all. How then can the community gain its first audience? If you sign up relatives and friends, it turns out that the audience is still not the target one. And if you buy advertising, no one will subscribe to an empty community. How to find a way out?
People come to you for content. Therefore, your community will not be empty if you tell things there that are interesting to the target audience. Advertising for the target audience is an ideal option to start with. This will give you a core audience that will help you grow organically.
13. How do you understand that a penalty has been imposed on the community? How to remove it?
Looking at the statistics, this can be seen in the decreased coverage. Analyze what you have been doing in recent days, which can be regarded by the platform as unwanted actions: clickbait, aggressive audience withdrawal, unoriginal content, too frequent posting. Stop doing this. And it will go away on its own in two days :-)
14. Are there filters based on topic? (For example, “adult content” is downgraded). If yes, what topics have reduction coefficients?
Everything that is not prohibited by the legislation of the Russian Federation and the rules of the site is possible. Everything that is prohibited is prohibited.
15. A case from our practice. We publish unique articles on the blog every day, and they are immediately parsed by several VKontakte public pages. It turns out that they announce this content first, and we announce it 5-10 minutes later. Does this negatively impact the coverage of our posts?
16. That is, the one who first shares the link is considered the original source? If this is the case, we cannot compete with autoparsers, since they do this automatically, but with us manually, we write a unique announcement. What should we do in this case?
I didn’t share the link, but downloaded the content natively. Embeds and links, in principle, do not make you the original source of content. We don’t know what’s on someone else’s video hosting or website, and we don’t parse or analyze this content. That’s why it’s important to upload your materials to the platform’s native submission tools.
17. How will search engines index articles created using the editor? Wiki articles were well found in searches, but what will happen now?
Articles are perfectly indexed by Yandex from the very start, and by Google already too.
18.
the LIVE public hosted by a VKontakte employee?
Is it possible to refer to it as an official source of information? At one's own risk. This is an unofficial community.
How the algorithm works
19. Are living people involved in the work of Prometheus? Or is the decision entirely left to the algorithm? How does he learn? Can you tell me in simple words?
The algorithm is automated and independently searches for new authors. The neuron sometimes makes mistakes. We mark each such error by sending a signal to the network about the wrong choice. Based on this feedback, Prometheus learns.
20. We have been posting quality content that resonates with our audience for a long time, but we have never received the Prometheus fire. How can we influence this? Can you give specific recommendations? I want specifics, and not vague advice like “post the content that your audience likes.”
First of all, the algorithm reacts to original materials submitted in native VKontakte tools. Native content delivery formats are extremely important because they allow the algorithm to evaluate the uniqueness of the content and its subject matter. The first is important in order to get a tag, the second is to provide the author with a good coverage boost. Posts by such authors appear in the “Recommendations” section.
Almost all entries
Quick navigation:
"Prometheus" club
A kind of “club” of selected authors who have received recognition from the social network. You can find them by searching in the system. The result looks like this:
Convenient segmentation of all authors by sections is offered:
- New authors.
- Artists.
- Trips.
- All about games.
- Photographers.
- Music.
- Education.
- Theater and cinema.
- Humor.
- Bloggers.
- Cosplay. Literature.
- Sport and health.
- Home and beauty.
- Handmade.
- Other.
It has now become easier than ever to go into the desired topic and read the best!
