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📱 Product Features

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.

By Headlinne Editorial Team · Updated on

Behavior plus direct control

Headlinne personalizes automatically from your swipes, but you are not limited to implicit signals. Settings gives you explicit levers to shape the feed directly—useful when you want a change faster than behavior alone would produce it.

Think of it as two steering systems working together: the engine learns from what you do, and you can override or steer it deliberately.

The controls available

You can shape your feed with several settings:

  • Interested topics — priors that boost the subjects you care about
  • Disliked topics — an absolute block, honored no matter your behavior
  • Blocked sources — publishers you never want to see
  • Region preferences — geographies to favor or avoid
  • Profile reset — clear learned preferences and start fresh

How strong each control is

These controls are not all equal. A disliked topic is an absolute filter—articles matching it are blocked regardless of how much you have engaged with related content. Interested topics act as strong, persistent priors. Region preferences decay more slowly than topic preferences, because geographic interest tends to be stable.

This hierarchy ensures your explicit "no" always wins, while your explicit "yes" reliably shapes—without completely dictating—what you see.

Customization without a bubble

Even a heavily customized feed keeps a small exploration budget, so you still encounter adjacent and new topics. Customization narrows and focuses your feed; it does not seal it shut.

If you ever feel boxed in, widen your interests or reset your profile to rebuild from scratch.

Key takeaways

  • Settings lets you steer the feed directly, alongside automatic behavioral learning.
  • Disliked topics are an absolute block; interested topics are strong, lasting priors.
  • Even customized feeds retain exploration so they do not become a bubble.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between skipping and blocking?

Skipping is a soft behavioral signal that gradually reduces a topic or source. Blocking a source or disliking a topic is an absolute filter that removes matching content outright.

Will customizing my feed stop all surprises?

No. Headlinne keeps a small exploration budget so new and adjacent topics still appear, even in a customized feed.

Related Headlinne features

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