There is no guide on how to use River. I've been on here about a week. Let me break it down:
There's a bunch of ways to use River. If it's allowable, it's valid. You are valid.
Browse-only lurkers consume but contribute nothing to the network directly. No likes button means they're powerless in the attention economy, even though they're a huge chunk of the audience. Museum goers.
Post-and-browse people are the connective tissue. You can reach them through the feed, through networking, through their content--basically any strategy works. There's a subset of these people, professional curators, who only add existing posts to collections and don't post anything new.
Post-only people become visible to everyone else but stay disconnected from the network. You can get their attention by engaging with their stuff, but that's about it. They can become highly visible but only to the other two groups.
Each time someone uses River, they click through a number of posts, channels, or user profiles. I would guess the average click count per session is around 10 (idk pulled it out my ass) with heavily tailed distributions. Traversing from user, to channel, to post. We could conceptualize the success of the platform as dependent on having good content within a certain number of clicks away. The user has to stay engaged enough to find and dig for it. Yadda, yadda monetization, personal enrichment from the platform.
Most social networks follow or approximate scale-free behavior. River is no exception. This means that some users or channels hold much, much more attention by being more connected to other users or channels. There is then a large tail of users or channels which are very sparsely connected or unconnected at all. This scale-free behavior--that network structure which is itself a product of possible user actions--is what dictates attention on the platform.
Holding attention is strongly but not purely a numbers games. This is good in creating an engaged user base. The more you post, comment, dm, or connect--anything that puts your username in front of someone--reduces the number of clicks it takes to get to your user profile. With the unified feed, its purely chronological arrangement and lack of algorithm means items fade from discoverability quickly. Regardless of a post's quality, its success in becoming more connected and more and more discoverable is path-dependent. It depends on who happened to see it, what channel it got added to, and what other channels it gets connected to. Since everyone's posts flow through that unified feed, that main source of discoverability, it is a common good and subject to the same dynamics as other commons. It is game-able by bad behavior for instance.
All this talk about discoverability and engagement may seem laughable now. In my mind, that's currently not the main motivation for most on River. Some people enjoy being mostly invisible but still sharing. People do embrace the idea of serendipity and wandering. What happens if the platform grows much larger? At a certain point, it's hard to argue that attention is trivial. It's not just about the growth of the platform but how it's accomplished. There are potentially critical phase transitions that will influence how the platform feels because of the culture and current feature implementation.
Let's materialize some of this using our imagination 🌈. A well-known K-pop artist with a large following says they love using River. We all become K-pop stans now (about time). The main feed, the key point of discoverability, becomes a flood of engagement with the artist's account. The existing user base shocked at the sudden shift, is overwhelmed by the influx. Some leave and some stay, trying to cultivate multiple distinct communities on the platform, tug-of-war ensues. Maybe an algorithm isn't so bad -> tumblr again.
As always, conventional forms of prestige (irl) can still be used to capture attention through rapid building of networks. Right now, cooperation looks like co-curation and co-commenting. Real-life friend networks have a huge advantage here. Cheating shows up as feed spamming or channel add suggestion spam, which can burn through your social capital. Parasitism is subtler--using a similar name as a popular account, not reciprocally engaging (me right now).
There are some obvious strategies (some nefarious ngl) to try and increase capture of that attention but it depends if you are trying to attract attention to your profile in general or a specific post. River rewards some specific approaches. I think high quality visual posts work, especially gifs because basically no one else posts them. Having a popular channel works. There exists some optimal posting time and posting frequency. Again, being a popular user works--bring a bunch of people to the platform and you instantly have an 'audience'. Spamming new posts works. Making multiple accounts or botting to cross-propagate theoretically works. Now, if you want to promote specific content rather than your whole profile, you should actually own fewer channels and use pinning strategically. Spreading yourself across multiple channels dilutes attention.
The introduction of longer form content is really new right now. River's overall setup works for one-off posts that don't require much effort to post. Longer form content has a much higher investment in creation time and oh boy there's a near universal desire for our bigger investments to have bigger payoffs. Users who post long-form will see their well-researched post slide down the River feed into obscurity. If users aren't comfortable with that, it absolutely will disincentivize engagement-focused viewers from making this style of content. FWIW, I don't think it's a bad thing--this isn't substack--but it will continue to shape River's culture and the content generating that culture to be predominantly ephemeral and visual.
River's ethos is currently based on wandering, connection, vibes rather than optimization. It's about size. But growth makes attention scarce and valuable, which changes things, changes incentives. Some questions: at what user count do current cultural norms break down? How do smaller communities continue and actually form within the channel structure? What could preserve cultural continuity during growth phases? How does the lack of post-level metrics affect long-term content quality?
