GraphQL query for only unseen content - Schema Advice

Question

I'm building a graphql schema through AWS AppSync and have a question regarding schema structure. My app will show users new posts and have them either join or pass on them. I'm trying to build in a way that I will only show users new posts and not repeat or at least not repeat for a certain amount of time. It's similar to swiping on tinder, they don't show you somebody again if you've already swiped on them. Does anybody have any ideas how to structure this in my schema. Do I need to store references to all of the seen posts in the user model or should I store each swipe as its own model and how should I structure the querying? I'd appreciate any advice on this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming a post has a creation time, you could keep track of the last (max created time) post they've seen, then display anything after that.

But think about what happens if they've been off the app for 5 minutes, or 5 days, or 5 weeks... depending on the volume of posts you anticipate they could quickly get behind and have to wade through too many older posts.

One thought would be to show the next oldest post, based derived from the creation time of the most recent post they viewed. Unless N number of posts were created since the last time they were online (a threshold you'd have to decide). Then start with displaying the N - Xth post (where X is 5, or 500, again depending on volume) until they're all caught up.

There are lots of ways you could program it, it all depends on your use case, you may want to take "popular" posts into account for example, those might be weighted above/before the other posts in their backlog.

Hope this helped.