4:30 PM
@AndrewT. hey sorry for the long delay, been a weird couple of weeks (vacation last week + finalizing cross-country moving plans this week) -- The issue can be caused by both of the things you described and we have two different ways to tackle them, one of which is failing.
1. For brand spanking new account creations we have no info on them so we just give them an anonymous feed until we get more relevant info on them.
The feed works as a kind of generator running in the background on users it knows it should run on. After a long while (couple weeks iirc) of a user not pulling data out of the generator by loading their feed we stop generating new ones.
it ends up getting the user in a stage where if they come back after let's say 2 months, the generator stopped making feed items for them months ago so their first page load will be empty, the second one will be empty, and the Nth one will finally have content on it.
To try to tackle that case, of a user who hasn't used the app for a long time, we first try pulling up to 5 pages of the feed in case the first one is empty, and if after the 5th one it's empty too we're supposed to be reverting to the anonymous feed
it definitely doesn't work though. that bug hits me on testing accounts all the time.
I think the real solution is to make the API not return empty pages, so it's a bigger issue
