Hey Pickful community,

Two topic updates today: topics can now introduce themselves on video, and the Topics page makes it easier to find where the conversation is happening right now.

💡 One thing first: your AI assistant (Claude, Codex or any other MCP client) reads the tool instructions and handles the tools and parameters below for you. Just say what you want, for example: “Create a topic called Stablecoin School and add these two videos as its intro.”

🎬 Topic intro videos

A short video often explains what a topic is about, and why it’s worth joining, better than a long description. Now:

• Create topics from your AI assistant or the API: name, description and cover in one go. Same rules as the website: you need at least 500 points, and creating a topic costs 100
• Up to 10 intro videos per topic, shown at the top of the topic page under the cover, in the order you add them
• Two ways to add a video: share a public video link and we fetch it, or upload a file directly
• Chinese videos stay clean: videos are treated as Chinese by default, with no subtitles or translation
• English videos get both languages: English subtitles are generated automatically and translated into Chinese, and viewers can switch between them in the player
• Portrait and landscape side by side: videos sit in one row at the same height, each as wide as its own shape; on phones, swipe through them
• Only the topic’s creator and moderators can add or remove intro videos

New videos take a few minutes to process, then appear on the topic page. The tools: create_topic, get_topic, add_topic_video, remove_topic_video. For now, intro videos are added through an AI assistant or the API; adding them on the website comes later.

🔥 The Topics page now shows active topics first

The Topics page used to rank topics by total posts, so big topics that had been quiet for months held the top spots while new, lively ones sat at the bottom. Now:

• “Active” by default: topics are ordered by their most recent post, so the ones people are talking in right now come first
• New topics get a fair start: a topic with no posts yet counts from when it was created, so it’s visible from day one
• “Popular” is one tap away: switch to Popular to see the biggest topics, still ranked by total posts

Only published posts count as activity: drafts and removed posts don’t, and a scheduled post counts when it actually goes live. The order can lag by up to about 10 minutes.

💬 To the community

Topics are where people come together to go deep. We hope intro videos help newcomers get a topic at a glance, and that the new order gives every well-run topic a chance to be seen. If anything feels off, let us know anytime.

Live now on Web, iOS and Android. No app update needed.

Pickful Team
10.19