CHANGELOG

Every product and methodology change, dated.

2026-08-06 — Framing coverage

Gemini now writes the framing read on a majority of live clusters instead of a small slice, so more comparison pages have a specific left-vs-right explanation instead of a generic template.

Pricing no longer uses founding-member framing. The household plan, cancel flow, and member brief are the live paid surface.
Plan availability (including household) is resolved on the server so the pricing page is complete in the first HTML, not after hydration.

Hero cards carry an Optics Desk read. High-stakes political splits lead over sports and entertainment fluff.
Added The Spin Report (weekly recap) and Spot the Spin, a daily left-vs-right wording game.

Web checkout is live. Optics monitors 600+ feeds from 490+ outlets; trust copy uses those figures instead of the older 380/250 counts.
Suspect clusters (sources that may not be the same event) no longer publish. Story URLs keep resolving after feed rebuilds via the day archive.

Homepage opens on live left-vs-right comparisons instead of a marketing column. Added 200+ vetted feeds in the days around this change.

Same-event validator (broad-topic guard). When the strongest left/right headlines share only topic nouns (e.g. “silicon valley”) and zero action-like tokens (verbs, numbers, concrete events), the cluster is demoted to Needs Review. Catches loose topic clusters that the event-type vocabulary check missed.
Outlier filter in strongest-pair selection. If a source disagrees with the cluster's center article on event type or shares zero substantive tokens with it, it's dropped before the leftmost/rightmost pair is chosen for display. The public-facing pair stays clean even when the cluster has one obvious outlier.
Homepage main grid: high-confidence only. “Today's clearest examples” no longer accepts medium-confidence 3-source matches. Those drop into /search and the developing shelves.
Search results split. “Cleanest same-event matches” now also requires the same-event validator to pass, not just the trust-category gate. Failures appear under a renamed “Developing / Needs Review” section with explicit caveats.
Terms aligned with web billing. Terms now describe both web and iOS subscription surfaces explicitly, including the separation between them during open beta.

Same-event validator added. Detects when a cluster mixes different event types (explosion vs flood, shooting vs stabbing, crash vs poisoning, …) or when the strongest left/right headlines share <18% substantive tokens. Demotes the story to Needs Review across every public surface. First test case caught: a coal-mine explosion cluster that included an unrelated Hunan flood article.
Share-card and embed trust gate. /story/<id>/share and /embed/<id> now return 404 when a story is Needs Review, fails the same-event check, or has a news-vs-opinion format mismatch. Bad matches can no longer generate viral images or embeds even by direct URL.
Frontend source canonicalization. “Daily Wire” / “The Daily Wire” and “The Hill” / “The Hill Home” now collapse to a single source by canonical domain at render time. Source counts and bias-bucket counts no longer inflate from feed-name duplicates.
Compare index / pair-page consistency. topOutletPairs now applies the same SLUG_ALIASES as the pair-page lookup, fixing the case where the index claimed N live comparisons but the pair page rendered an empty state. Pair pages with no live matches now suggest live working pairs instead of dead-ending.
Blindspot card imbalance label. Cards now show explicit counts (“Right underrepresented: 6L / 2C / 0R”) instead of contradictory “true blindspot + all three buckets included” copy.

Match-confidence panel. “Can I trust it? Yes” replaced with “Match confidence: High / Medium / Developing / Watch” with explicit caveats and a “not a fact-check” disclaimer on the high tier.
Report bad match. Story rail now has a “Spotted a bad match?” form. Submissions go to a corrections webhook.
Daily Different Spin lifted to live. Homepage hero now opens with the email-capture funnel instead of a search box. Pricing pitch rewritten from “support a tool” to value-led copy.
Backend source dedup. canonicalSourceKey() in the worker keys sources by canonical domain instead of raw feed name, preventing feed-name duplicates from inflating source counts on cron.
Square share-card layout. Tighter padding, smaller headline, drops the description block — fixes the overlap of headline and footer in 1:1 exports.

Public Optics companion site launched on Vercel.
Added Wording Gap meters, source-spread bars, Frame Lens, Blindspot Watch, public methodology, and crawler metadata.