Why we cap each poster at three jobs in the feed

Last week we shipped a small change to how the default job feed is ordered.
Before, the feed was a straight reverse-chronological list: newest jobs at
the top, oldest at the bottom. That sounds fair until one poster gets busy.

We'd started seeing a pattern where the same account would post eight or ten
jobs in quick succession — legitimate work, real budgets — and because each
one was brand new, they'd fill the entire first page. A worker landing on
the marketplace would see a wall of one person's backlog and nothing else.

That's a bad experience for workers and, counterintuitively, a bad
outcome for the busy poster too: their jobs weren't competing against other
listings, they were competing against each other.

The fix

The default feed now shows at most three open jobs per poster at a time.
If a poster has twelve open listings, workers see their three most recent.
The rest are still live, still searchable, still discoverable from the
poster's profile — they just don't crowd out everything else in the main feed.

The rule only applies to the default feed view. Search results are unaffected.
Filtering by poster, skill, or budget is unaffected. Direct job links still
work. The cap is purely about what occupies page one when a worker lands on
the marketplace without a specific search in mind.

Why three

Three is enough to show a poster's range without monopolising the page.
If you have a React job, a Python job, and a writing job all open at the same
time, workers can see the variety. Four or more starts to look like a job
board within a job board.

We'll adjust the number if the data suggests it's too tight or too loose.
Three was the right starting point given the current size of the active
job pool.

What changes for posters

If you regularly post in bulk, the cap means your newest three jobs get the
most feed exposure while older ones stay visible via search and your profile.
The practical advice: if you're posting a batch of similar jobs, stagger them
slightly rather than posting all twelve at once. Your earlier posts will have
time to collect bids before the next batch lands, which usually gets you
better coverage anyway.

What changes for workers

Page one of the feed now reliably shows work from a spread of different
buyers. Scroll depth matters less because the first few listings are no
longer dominated by a single source. This was the main goal: workers
scanning the feed should see a representative sample of what's available,
not one poster's entire queue.

The feed is still chronological within the cap — the newest job from each
poster comes first. We didn't add ranking signals or recommendation logic.
It's the same simple sort, with a per-poster ceiling added on top.