How people find you
There is no feed to win. People arrive looking for an experience. You're there because you lived it.
Nine categories, hundreds of sub-categories
Discover has nine top-level categories: Education, Work, Home & Living, Travel, Family & Relationships, Money, Ownership, Bureaucracy & Law, and Pursuits & Interests. Each one branches into more than 200 specific experiences. A story doesn't just sit under “Education.” It can sit under Education › Exchange programme › Erasmus, next to everyone else who lived that same exchange.
That specificity is the whole mechanism. You don't need thousands of people searching for “travel stories” to find you. You need the handful looking for exactly what you lived.
You filter, you sort
There's no algorithm behind Discover, and no engagement score decides who gets seen first. Whoever's looking narrows a category by details like period and satisfaction. They choose how to sort the results themselves, including by story score if they want.
Nothing is promoted to the top by default. The filters do the narrowing. The reader does the sorting.
Story scores
Say two people both quit stable jobs to start something that eventually failed. One is a natural storyteller who could make it sing at a dinner table. The other freezes in front of a camera and mumbles through the same facts. On Stird neither of those things matters, because a twin does the talking for both of them. What a visitor scores, once they've actually talked with that twin, is the story itself: whether it gave real detail, whether it held together, whether it went deeper when they pushed.
Scoring only opens up once someone has talked with the twin for a while. The chat shows how many answers are left before it becomes available. Each of the three measures gets a number from 1 to 10. The result is anonymous, and it only appears once enough people have scored it.
Nothing has to be public
None of this requires you to put anything out there. A memory defaults to private, and a story only counts toward its category once its audience is wider than that. Even then, Discover shows the category and its details, not the story's text, unless you've made that visible too.
Your profile
Every live twin has a public profile at stird.app/u/handle: name, handle, bio, and a website link if you added one. Anyone can open it without an account. Talking to your twin is the part that needs a sign-in.
Followers and friends
The other side of your visibility settings. Someone follows you, or you add each other as friends, and that becomes a tier you can share a story with, same as choosing public or private. What each tier actually changes is covered on Who sees what.
Frequently asked
What should I do to stand out?
There's nothing to buy, and no algorithm to please. What actually helps is writing a story worth talking about. That's covered on What you create.
Can I stay invisible?
Yes. By default, nothing you write is public until you choose otherwise.
What happens if my score is low?
Nothing happens to your account. The score belongs to the story. It only shows once someone has actually talked to that twin and enough people have scored it.
Can I turn story scores off?
Yes, per story, any time. The scores already given aren't deleted. They come back if you turn it back on.
Will my profile show up on Google?
Your profile page (name, handle, bio) is always public. The stories on it show up only for whatever you've set to public.