MEGA UPDATE POST!

Hey there, younowers! We've been hard at work making your platform better, and we're excited to share these changes with you!

✨BRAND NEW LOOK!

Starting today on web and over the next two weeks in our apps, we are introducing a brand-new explore page for younow! The biggest update you will see is that all of your streams will now be sorted into categories as you scroll down the page. This allows us to feature your streams in multiple categories, and we are no longer limited by the relatively small number of categories we used to have at the top of the page.

One of the things that excites us the most about this update is that we will be able to feature partners and non-partners in their own categories, which means that our streamers no longer have to fight to be at the top of trending in order to be discovered. For those of you who love trending, don't worry: it is still there too. Now, we just have more ways to help viewers find streams that they find interesting.

Another major change as part of this redesign that you will notice is your following updates have moved; on web, they are in the sidebar along with your friends list. On mobile, you'll see a following tab on the right of the explore page where games used to be.

Finally, you'll notice that we changed the size of some of the thumbnails you'll see on the explore page. If you're a broadcaster, check your thumbnails to make sure they look ok on our new page.

🔢REVISED TRENDING SCORE

A few months ago, we made changes to our moderation to try and limit AFK broadcasts and focus more heavily on active content creation. There was a lot of confusion in the community about what actually constitutes an AFK broadcast, and a lot of our more active broadcasters got frustrated.

We recognize that managing AFK broadcasts through moderation did not work as we had hoped, and so along with the new explore page, we are launching our first major revision of the trending score in several years. Here is how it works from now on:

• We are giving you a boost for having active chatters in your stream. The more, the better, so encourage those chats!

• In addition, the more people watching you, the higher you'll trend

• Likes still matter a lot for trending, although we are making it so that both chatters and viewers will have a measurable effect as well. This means that if you have a stream with a lot of engagement but not a lot of gifts, you will likely outperform a stream with a lot of gifts given but almost no viewers.

• If your stream is over 4 hours, you'll be penalized on your trending score. If you're an active streamer, this should not be an issue: end your stream near the four hour mark and start a new one after taking a quick break. If you're an AFK streamer, you will see your trending placement fall. As most AFK streams have pretty limited engagement, they likely will not appear towards the top of trending anyway.

We are planning on tweaking this algorithm several times over the course of the next 6-12 months as we figure out exactly how we want to weight each of these factors and highlight the immense amount of talent we see on younow. Our goal with these changes is to de-emphasize gift giving and how long a broadcaster is live in our trending score, and promote people who are building a community. Of course, active communities with lots of gift giving will still have the highest trending score.

📛BADGES! AND MORE BADGES!

So.... our badges kind of sucked. We only had a few of them, they were virtually impossible to get, and creating a new one would take three people a week for our team, which is why you pretty much never saw any new badges.

That ends now.

We have totally revamped our badge system so that we can award badges for a wide variety of reasons, like:

• Your peers voted you the best streamer of the day on younow, or

• You won an event, or

• You composed an amazing new song live, or

• You ate 57 grilled cheese sandwiches in 15 minutes and didn't die, or

• You chatted with the most people, or

• Pretty much anything!

These badges will appear right next to your username, the same as the Majesty Badge does today for the top supporter on the platform. We are going to be experimenting with this a lot in the next few weeks. If you see someone with a new badge next to their name, ask them about it!

🐛BUG SQUASHING

We had some really unfortunate bugs last week that were mostly related to work we were doing to get all of these new features live, the biggest of which is that it was impossible to guest someone in your stream for your first five minutes. Please keep reporting these bugs to us via support or just posting on Jon's wall: we review all of them, and are fixing them.

The other really big bug that we've had is with our chat system between our VIP team and you. We rebuilt this system completely in the Spring, and it really hasn't worked right since. What has been happening is that our system has been automatically routing your chats to the wrong person on our team, and then won't let that person forward it to the right person. This creates a massive headache for all of us, and it's why we've been using WhatsApp and Instagram to communicate with you all a lot. We are fixing this issue; it's very difficult to solve, and it's taking us much more time than anticipated.

🎬COMING SOON...

Oh, right. We never report what we're working on in advance, although we can say that our next major update will have the most-requested feature we get on younow...