ManyStories Promotes Writers
How ManyStories Uses AI To Prioritize Humans
ManyStories is a community for writers and readers to connect. Regardless of where you publish, you can share all of your stories with the thousands of readers who visit ManyStories each day to connect with the stories of other people. ManyStories makes that easy.
The way we achieve that is by prioritizing humans over bots and spam.
Today, we launched a new feature that will show off the many faces of our community: the writers.
This carousel of writers will show under the featured stories atop our homepage. When a visitor hovers one of the writers’ face, a popover of the number of stories they’ve shared will show up. The reader can also click through to the writer’s profile to view all of their stories and follow the writer for more.
I just want to take a moment to share how we make this happen behind the scenes.
You might be wondering how we handle writers who don’t include their face in their profile picture. This is actually a problem I ran into when developing this feature. Here’s how the carousel looked before this problem was solved:
While we still want to include these faceless writers — who don’t have their face in their profile picture — in the carousel, we want to prioritize showing the faces of writers on the platform, we want to bring our faced writers to the front of carousel.
We achieve that using face recognition machine learning models. Thanks to Microsoft Azure’s Face API, we can easily check whether a writer’s profile image includes a human face. If the writer’s avatar has an image, we move them to the front of the list. Otherwise, they are sent to the end.
Additionally, before doing that sorting of faces, we shuffle the list of writers. Put it all together, and we get a carousel full of the beautiful faces of our writers:
Now, if you’re a writer who doesn’t currently have your beautiful face in your profile picture, you can change that by going to your ManyStories profile and click “Edit profile”:
Once you add your new image with your face, ManyStories will eventually check for your face in your profile image.
It’s that simple. Of course, to appear in our carousel of recent writers, you’ll have to share your stories on ManyStories.
