📱 Product Features
Topic Following on Headlinne
Headlinne learns the topics you care about both explicitly and from behavior. Here is how expressing topic interest shapes your feed—and why it never fully overrides what you do.
By Headlinne Editorial Team · Updated on
Two ways to follow a topic
On Headlinne, following a topic works in two complementary ways. You can express interests explicitly—selecting topics during onboarding or in Settings—and you also follow topics implicitly, simply by liking and reading articles about them.
Both feed into the same recommendation profile. Explicit choices give the engine a head start; behavior refines and extends it over time.
How explicit interests are weighted
When you select topics of interest, they act as priors that shape your feed strongly at first. As you accumulate swipes, your actual behavior takes on more weight—but explicitly chosen interests never decay to zero influence.
That design choice matters: it means a long-time user who updates their interests in Settings will see that change respected, rather than drowned out by months of past behavior.
How behavioral following works
Every like, read, and skip updates topic and subtopic affinity scores. Engage with a topic and it surfaces more; skip it consistently and it fades. This is "following" without any explicit button—your attention is the signal.
Headlinne tracks affinity at a granular level (subtopics and entities, not just broad topics), so following can be as specific as your reading habits are.
Following without a bubble
Following topics could narrow a feed into a bubble—so Headlinne always reserves a small, non-zero exploration budget that introduces adjacent and new topics.
The result is a feed centered on what you follow, but not sealed off from everything else.
Key takeaways
- ✓You follow topics both explicitly (in Settings) and implicitly (through behavior).
- ✓Explicit interests act as strong priors and never decay to zero influence.
- ✓Exploration keeps topic-following from sealing your feed into a bubble.
Frequently asked questions
Can I change my followed topics later?
Yes. Update your interests in Settings anytime. Because explicit interests never lose all influence, the change will be reflected in your feed.
Related Headlinne features
Related reading
Continue learning
Customizing Your Feed
Beyond learning from behavior, Headlinne gives you direct controls—interests, disliked topics, blocked sources, and regions—to shape your feed. Here is how to use them.
Behavioral Learning Explained
Headlinne learns from what you do, not what you declare. Here is how behavioral learning turns swipes, reads, and searches into a feed that adapts to you.
Start reading personalized news with Headlinne
Create your free account and build a feed that learns what you care about.