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
    7·
    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.

  • EthicalAI@beehaw.org
    5·
    1 year ago

    I want to make 100% sure that in “Hot” you don’t just see big communities. I want to always see that one post from that one community with 1 user right at the top. So they should weight by community size.

    • isildun@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      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.

  • Matthieu@piaille.fr
    2·
    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

  • kurosawaa@lemmy.world
    2·
    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.

    • GlitchyDigiBun@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      None of the megaguides I’ve seen actually show how to use the mobile apps/sites. I’ve been told what the Fediverse is and how it works enough times to build the backend myself, but I have no clue how to navigate.

    • RQG@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      That might be true. I’m glad you can set your own defaults but having the starting fknfkg to be a generally useful one is a good idea. Im curious if people find Local to be a good default? Subscribed doesn’t make sense I guess because you start out with no subscriptions. But maybe all is nice to find new communities and explore?

      • kurosawaa@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        Maybe instance owners could have a recommended subscriptions option that new users could default to. That way new users can experience seeing content on other instances right away. Different instances with different standards could customize their new user experience.

  • Juki@lemmy.world
    1·
    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

  • John_Coomsumer@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m on jerboa, and like others are saying “active” is pretty ass and ‘hot’ is okay. My main actual complaint is the inability to sort comments! Please God, I’m tired of seeing the rare hateful message with 1/2 up votes on top, and then a more normal good comment with 50 up votes beneath it. Going to be a real problem for onboarding people and optics.

  • Master@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Something feels wrong but I normally just browsed “best” on reddit and that was a curated list of top subs. So it’s weird to me to sort Lemmy by “Hot” and get a ton of posts from random communities with no upvotes or replies. Which they are obviously not HOT as no one has engaged with them except the OP.

    I feel like something is “off” with the way it is curating things.

  • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    So I think it’s just growing pains of the software still being at a pretty early stage; I agree it’s not ideal right now but I’m fairly confident it’ll get worked out. That said, there’s one option that I’d really like that may not be in the works: I’d like the ability for posts I’ve seen to get bumped way down in the ranks, so when I refresh the front page it’s mostly new stuff. Mostly the reason people go next -> next -> next is from wanting more stuff; it’d be nice if we could cut out the middleman and just show them new stuff.

  • TheAmorphous@lemmy.world
    1·
    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?