Rhyme.com Dev Update #1: One topic, one place: how topics works on Rhyme
First of all, thank you! Over 1,000 of you joined the Rhyme.com waitlist in the first 24 hours after we announced, and the feedback was something like 99.9% positive. The suggestions have been thoughtful and the whole response affirmed two things for our team: that this is a platform people actually want, and that the hours we've spent building it have been time well spent. Please keep the feedback and suggestions coming.
With that out of the way, We want to start a series of posts walking through the different pieces of Rhyme. The goal is to explain what each part does, why we built it that way, and open the door to feedback on each individual area during this beta period. Today's post is about the most foundational piece: topics, and how posting actually works.
Topics are created by the platform, not by users
This is probably the single biggest structural difference between Rhyme and other platforms, so it's worth leading with: on Rhyme, topics exist at the platform level. We create them, not users.
Right now, the platform has roughly 88,000 topics. We bootstrapped that initial layer largely from Wikipedia and Wikidata, which was admittedly a bit of a nightmare on our end! But that's our problem, not yours, and the result is that it's now genuinely rare for someone to want to discuss something and find that no topic exists for it today.
The system can also get pretty granular. There's a topic for Apple. There's a topic for AirPods. There's a topic for AirPods Max. The same logic applies across every subject area.
A common question we wrestled with internally was: how granular do we go? The rule of thumb we landed on was basically: do people talk about this thing on its own? Do people talk about AirPods? Yes. Do people talk about AirPods Max specifically? Yes. Do people talk about the specific battery inside the AirPods Max? No. That's where we stop. Silly example, but it's the logic.
For the genuinely niche stuff that doesn't deserve its own topic but does come up occasionally…like AirPods Max cases, AirPods Max skins, that kind of thing…we do have a tagging system that makes them surfaceable when someone needs them. I'll save the details for a future post.
Hierarchy: topics live in a tree
The other thing to know upfront is that topics aren't a flat list, they live in a multidirectional tree with parents, children, and siblings.
Apple sits under Technology. Under Apple, you've got macOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro, Final Cut, Logic, and so on. Apple's siblings (same level in the tree) might be Microsoft, Dell, Sony, and other companies of similar scope. We're actively refining the system that decides which siblings to surface most prominently (because "most relevant sibling" is a fuzzy concept), but there's a detailed map view you can click into to explore the tree yourself.
We’re going to dedicate a whole post to hierarchy later, because it has some interesting downstream effects on how posts surface. For now, just know: it's a tree, and the tree matters.
How posting works
You can create a post from anywhere on Rhyme. There's a "new post" button on your homepage, on every topic page, and on every thread. The first thing the system notes is where you were when you hit that button, which becomes useful later when a post's intent is ambiguous.
From there it's familiar: you write a title, a description, optionally share a link or image, hit submit. While you're typing, the algorithm is quietly working in the background trying to figure out where this post belongs. It uses a bunch of signals like the content of the post itself, where you started writing it, what topics you've been viewing recently, your posting history, and so on.
Here's where it gets interesting: a single post can live in multiple topics simultaneously.
Say you write:
"I've been a longtime Apple fan and I really love macOS, but lately I've been considering switching to Linux. Anyone been down this path who can offer recommendations?"
The algorithm reads that and figures out that the conversation is going to come primarily from the Linux community, but there's also going to be meaningful engagement from macOS and Apple folks. So the post gets assigned to Linux as its primary topic…and it also surfaces in macOS and Apple, just at lower visibility.
On top of that, hierarchy compounds the effect. If a post's primary topic is macOS, it also surfaces in Apple (the parent) less frequently, and in Technology (the grandparent) less frequently still. So one well-placed post can naturally reach the right audiences at the right intensities without you having to cross-post anywhere.
Quick aside on something we get asked a lot: the system is very good at not being gamed. Old-school attempts to force a post into the "wrong" topic by stuffing it with irrelevant keywords just don't work. The algorithm is looking at intent and substance, not surface-level pattern matching. And an important note: the algorithm isn't acting as an arbiter of what you're allowed to say. It's making sure posts end up where they belong. There's a separate post coming on the broader analyzer, and I'll get into the "what does it actually decide" question there.
What happens when a topic doesn't exist yet
So what about new things? New products, new bands, new everything. Let's say the Clicks Communicator (a real, niche Android phone with a physical keyboard) launches tomorrow. You write a post:
"Anyone seen the Clicks Communicator? Big Android fan, was a big BlackBerry fan back in the day, curious if this seems viable and whether you'd buy one."
The algorithm reads it and immediately identifies that you're talking about Android, a little about BlackBerry, and a thing called the Clicks Communicator. Android and BlackBerry both have topics. Clicks Communicator doesn't…yet. But the algorithm determines pretty quickly that this is a real product people are going to want to discuss, so it goes off and does its homework. It figures out what the Clicks Communicator is, generates a topic for it, grabs an appropriate image, writes a description, and slots it into the hierarchy (probably under cell phones, with Android and BlackBerry as siblings). Your post then lives primarily under the new Clicks Communicator topic, and also surfaces in Android and BlackBerry because it's relevant there too. All of that happens in the time it takes to submit a post.
A natural follow-up worry: won't this generate a million junk topics? In practice, no. The algorithm is pretty conservative about whether something is actually a thing people will discuss, and it almost always gets that right. Our incentives lean toward generosity here. Server resources for this are effectively unlimited on our side, and because of how hierarchy and multi-topic posting work, an unused niche topic doesn't hurt anyone. The post about it still surfaces in the broader topics it relates to, so conversations don't die in empty rooms.
Community input on topics
Topics aren't fully locked once they exist. There's a flagging system, and "flag" here doesn't mean "report for badness," it's more general than that. You can flag a topic to say "this description is inaccurate" or "this image is wrong/low-quality" or basically "something here needs attention." When enough flags accumulate (the threshold scales depending on topic size/age/engagement/etc), it gets reviewed and corrected.
We're also actively experimenting with giving communities a bit more direct input on their topics. The example I keep coming back to: right now the Pop Music topic might really want a Michael Jackson avatar. We think there should be some way for that to happen organically without it being a free-for-all. We're prototyping things that look a bit like polls or proposals…someone with enough account history could propose a topic image change, which opens a submission window, then a voting window, then a result. Something like that. Probably rate-limited per account so it doesn't get abused. We're not committed to a specific design yet, and I'd genuinely love feedback on what people would want here.
"But what if I want to create my own topic?"
This is the question we've gotten the most, and there are two different answers depending on what you mean.
If you mean "I want to start a niche community where like-minded people can hang out away from the broader conversation", that's intentionally not how Rhyme works, and we want to be upfront about that. A point worth making clearly: Rhyme isn't trying to replace other platforms where this is the norm. Those platforms still exist and still do what they do. We're trying to occupy a different spot in the ecosystem.
The specific thing we're trying to do differently is this: when something happens in the world…like breaking news, a major release, a cultural moment…it currently gets discussed in 30 different corners of every platform, each with its own preexisting bias, each reinforcing whatever spin its members already agreed on. We think that's part of why public conversation feels broken right now. Rhyme's bet is that there's value in everyone showing up to the same table for a given subject and working it out together. Taylor Swift drops a new album? It gets discussed in the Taylor Swift topic. Not separately in "Taylor Swift Lovers" and "Taylor Swift Haters." Fans and skeptics are both welcome; they're just expected to actually talk to each other rather than past each other.
That's a real tradeoff, and we understand it's not for everyone. If what you love about other platforms is the ability to carve out a small, like-minded space, Rhyme isn't trying to take that from you, it's just not what Rhyme is for. Those other platforms aren't going anywhere.
If you mean "I'm starting a company/band/project and I want a topic to exist for it", that's something we want to make easy, and we're actively building it right now. The plan is a simple submission form: tell us what it is, why it should exist, and we'll review it quickly. Because new genuine person/place/thing topics cost us essentially nothing and add real value, we expect to approve the vast majority of these. The reason we don't just let the algorithm do it on the fly for these cases is that for a truly new startup, there's no public information for the algorithm to draw on yet, so it'll (correctly) pass on auto-creating the topic. The submission form bridges that gap.
And worth noting: the platform isn't a spam-and-promotion free-for-all (there's a whole separate conversation coming on how we keep that from happening), but it also isn't hostile to people building things. If you made a great piece of screen recording software, posted about it, and it's genuinely interesting, today it's going to surface in macOS, in Video Editing, in Technology, in the places where people would want to know about it. That's kind of the point.
Wrapping up
That's topics in a nutshell. I've left plenty out like hierarchy mechanics, the analyzer, moderation, verification, feed filtering…and each of those is getting its own post in the coming weeks.
If you're on the waitlist, hang tight. We're letting more people in every day. If you're not on it yet and any of this sounds interesting, Rhyme.com is the place.
The single best thing you can do to help right now is spread the word. We'll talk again soon.
Happy Monday!