Discovery
How characters are ranked and surfaced on Reverie, what you can filter, and why an unfinished character never appears.
Discovery on Reverie is the character grid plus the rails on Home. This page covers what each sort actually orders by, which filters exist, and the admission rules that decide whether a public character is eligible to be shown at all.
Sorts on the character grid
Recommended is the default. Everyone sees the first four sorts; the last three appear only when you are signed in.
| Sort | What it orders by |
|---|---|
| Recommended | Popularity, then average rating — personalized once you have chat history |
| Popular | The nightly popularity score, highest first |
| New & noteworthy | A 7-day early-traction score, limited to characters first published in the last 30 days |
| Recently updated | Last edit, newest first |
| Following | Characters from creators you follow, newest first published |
| Favorites | Characters you have favorited |
| My Characters | Characters you created |
Alongside the sort you get a Category dropdown, a Gender dropdown, the search box, Browse all hashtags, a Card videos toggle, and Reset filters.
There is no language filter, no content-rating filter and no "this week"/"this month" window on the grid. Adult content is an account-wide setting at Settings → Preferences → Content filter, not a grid control, and your tag preferences are applied here too — when they are, a bar above the grid offers Show all this time and Manage tag preferences. See Preferences.
Signed out, the grid stops after three pages and offers a sign-in prompt.
What the ranking actually uses
Popular uses a score recomputed nightly from five inputs, each normalized and capped so no single number can dominate:
| Input | Weight | Saturates at |
|---|---|---|
| Total conversations | 30% | 1,000 |
| Average review rating | 25% | 5 stars |
| Number of reviews | 15% | 50 |
| Conversations in the last 30 days | 20% | 100 |
| Favorites | 10% | 500 |
A newly published character also gets a cold-start boost that starts at 15 points and decays linearly to 0 over 30 days, so a good character surfaces before it has a lifetime of engagement behind it.
New & noteworthy is a separate 7-day score: distinct users per day, chats started, messages per chat, new favorites, and how recently the character was first published.
Recommended adds personalization in stages, based on your last 20 web chats, weighted so recent chats count more:
| Your history | What is used |
|---|---|
| Signed out, or 1–2 chats | No personalization — featured characters, then popularity and rating |
| 3–5 chats | Your top three categories |
| 6 or more chats | Categories, plus a gender preference when over 60% of your weighted chats share one, plus a mature-content preference when over half do |
Characters you have already chatted with are excluded. On page one, up to 35% of the slots are reserved for characters published in the last 7 days by creators you follow.
The recommender reads metadata only: which character, its categories, its gender, its rating, and who you follow. It does not read the contents of your conversations.
Why a public character may not appear
Publishing and being discoverable are two different bars.
A character is filtered out of discovery entirely — while still being public — unless it has all five of: a name, a bio or description, a personality or description, an avatar, and at least one opening message. A public character with no greeting is invisible in the grid and in onboarding recommendations.
Two further rules apply:
- Public listings only include characters whose creator is an approved creator. See Becoming a creator.
- Recommended and Popular add a media bar when you are not searching: the character needs either an avatar video or at least three gallery images. Searching inside those tabs stays exhaustive, so a character you search for by name still turns up.
Search
There is no global search bar. Search is per surface, and it requires an account.
| Surface | Searches | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Characters | Name and bio, plus #tag and @name operators | Combined with AND; results stop after 15 pages |
| Stories | Title and blurb | Results stop after 3 pages |
Matching is substring and case-insensitive, not prefix matching. The operators split on the next # or @, so #regency tutor is read as one tag — "regency tutor" — rather than as a tag plus a word. To combine a tag with free text, put the tag last.
Moments, hashtags and creators have no search of their own.
Home
Home is a set of rails rather than a ranked list: the daily check-in banner, Continue for chats already in progress, a picks section drawn from one call that returns 8 hot, 8 rising, 8 recommended and 4 recent characters, featured stories, and the 12 newest moments.
Related
- Finding characters — the practical walkthrough
- Hashtags — how tags are derived and where they lead
- Collections — the editorial shelves on Home
- Following creators — what a follow changes in the grid
- Publishing — the creator side of these gates