Hello all,

Wanted to open a discussion on Lemmy’s post sorting options right now. I don’t have any experience with implementing this type of thing but right now the algorithm appears… Off? For example, ‘Active’ gives me a lot of posts over a day old but ‘Hot’ may as well be ‘New’ i.e. more recent posts with little engagement.

I don’t know if it’s due to Lemmy still picking up steam or a fundamental flaw with the algorithm. Like I said, I’m really curious to hear the opinions of those more knowledgeable.

  • finder@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My biggest issue is that posts stream in regardless of the sorting option you have picked. So, even if I am sorting by ‘hot’ posts I’ll get a stream of posts that where made less than a minute ago.

  • kurosawaa@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think having “Active” as default is unfortunate too, if a new user sees the top post was from two days ago they might assume the whole platform is inactive, since they can’t see that a new comment was added just seconds ago from that page view. Having “Hot” as the default would probably be better since those are usually newer posts with at least a few comments.

  • Matthieu@piaille.fr
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    1 year ago

    @programming
    @WatTyler
    There is a demo of an algorithmic timeline thingy for mastodon at https://fedifeed.herokuapp.com/ and I really really like how it has a bunch of sliders for fine-tuning. The time penalty in particular is very important.

    Would be absolutely awesome to have the same on lemmy.

    Edit: Lemmy doesn’t show my picture…

    https://static.piaille.fr/media_attachments/files/110/542/349/085/964/483/original/23daedec7cd17277.png

    • isildun@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Although it’s a little less convenient than just remembering across refreshes, you can set a default sort in your profile if there’s a particular sort you like.

      That being said I find myself hopping between Top Day and Hot so I can only start on one or the other. Would be nice if it just remembered.

  • TheAmorphous@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Can someone explain why if I choose All/Hot the first page will look “normal” for a bit, but then it starts updating/scrolling constantly? Like I can’t keep my place, new items are continuously being added and I can’t even finish reading a headline. I don’t see any settings to prevent that. What am I doing wrong?

  • Juki@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Biggest problem I think right now is how it auto-appends new posts to the top - browsing /new/ is a simply impossible task. Maybe just tell me there are new posts to fetch and let me refresh when I’m ready? Right now I can’t read stuff before it yeets off the bottom of the page

  • Pigeon@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’m a bit baffled - I love the active sort so far. Sure, it’s different from reddit, but in a good way. It means the exact timing of a post, to line up perfectly with the peak active hours of U.S. users, or similar, isn’t critical anymore, because a post can go relatively ignored for a day or two and then get picked up and filled with comments and discussion.

    It gives people more time to get around to reading a long linked article or watching a linked long video first, before commenting, too, while still leaving them able to participate in discussion after.

    It means that people who comment “late” still get replies. Commenting even slightly late on reddit and not getting any replies or votes felt awful, like you were talking to a wall. And the people who sorted by new and commented first tended to stick to the top of threads because they accumulated more upvotes by sheer force of time.

    I hope we can avoid re-creating the constant, over-hurried content-churn of reddit, and keep this more patient feel.

    That said, I’ll concede that active search is best for discussion posts, like on Chat or Gaming (e.g. threads that ask people to share favorite xyz games and so on), or those based around longread articles, and not necessarily as good for Breaking News. But even then… I think it does us good to allow time to discuss news posts, too, and active search does that.

    Tldr I use active search as default for everything and I absolutely love it like this, please don’t get rid of it just to make the site more like reddit.

    • ch00f@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Maybe some kind of bathtub curve could be applied. Lots of activity at the start is weighted because the topic is exciting, but that dies down for a bit, and then if someone picks up the thread much later, it gets more of a bump because the topic has longevity.

      Though there’s also the issue of two users basically having an ongoing discussion that’s gotten off track, but is keeping a stale post alive.