What does the Hot sorting actually mean?

Cras@feddit.uk to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 202 points –

Right now I have my feed sorted by Hot. The sixth post in my feed is 19 days old, has zero comments, and one upvote. I'm struggling to work out what algorithm is deciding this is a Hot post

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Sorting by anything seems pretty buggy now - growing pains, I guess. I tend to sort by "New comments" and from time to time I'll get threads with zero comments on top of my feed...

I'm sure it's going to get better with time - right now we're all basically taking part in an extended load test for Lemmy and federation mechanisms :)

Every time I have seen a post with 0 comments at the top when sorting by New Comments, the post itself was just posted.

True - which seems to be a bug to me, since that's what studying by New is supposed to show. I do find all the bugs kinda endearing though - reminds me of the internet of old and the time when reddit wax starting :)

I don't think it's a bug since it even says that sort method is meant to be like an old forum system. Which is to say, all new posts, or posts with new replies, get bumped to the top.

I just use "Top in 6 hours" as a functional substitute for "Hot".

From what I understand, hot is supposed to be like Reddit where they show up posts that are gaining traction in the day.

But yeah it's pretty buggy right now, been seeing a lot of old posts too

Supposed to be based on time since posted with some kind of logarithmic decay and rating.

But yeah it seems buggy.

Funny that the first post I saw when sorting by Hot is a post asking what hot sorting is

From my experience, sorting by Hot on Lemmy has always been kinda weird

I went into my preferences to change it to Top 6 Hours.

So far, after the change, I'm getting an experience closer to the old reddit (before they messed with the sorting to keep actually interesting things from getting to the top too quickly.)

This also is exposing me to smaller but not dead communities I can subscribe to.

Edit: Although, I suspect there might be a bug with Top 6 Hours in that it tries to do that too when I go to my own profile to see my recent comments. I don't suppose anyone knows where I'd look to see if there's an existing bug report for that? I'd expect, when looking at my own comments, to see ALL of them without the sorting applying to that page. Instead, that page works funky until I set my preferences back to Hot or Top or whatever.

If you set your default sorting method in your settings, it applies it to all pages by default. So your subscribed will also be sorted that way when you might prefer that be sorted by new or active. Then you need to manually choose to sort it differently each time you change between subscribed/local/all.

Yeah, it makes sense for those pages. I just wasn't expecting it to apply to my own comments when I go to my profile page as those pages on most sites exist outside of the forum sorting preferences.

For a big instance, Hot sorting seems to work pretty well. Otherwise Top Day is probably a better choice.

I actually enjoy that the algorithm is not that good. I hate it that every site nowadays just throws everything they think you want at you. It's so refreshing to just see what people are posting without that complex stuff going on in the back.

For me, the first page is showing new stuff but the second page sometimes shows posts from weeks ago or even 2 years ago.

Edit: hot is completely broken when I browse subscribed posts.

I'm sure it's growing pains. When it works it seems to be the best way of sorting things, but after a while it seems to give you new, relevant stuff interlaced with really old irrelevant stuff.

Cultured gentlemen of honour sort by new.

I love sorting by new, its chock full of interesting (and shit) content that you'll never know what to expect lmao

Sorting by hot and All, my front page looks like this right now - guess the bugged algorithm really likes that community for some reason.

Mine keeps pushing the firefox community to the top for some reason.

I like to use Hot for up and coming kinda posts, or finding random communities. When I get bored of that, I normally do one of the Top ones (Day, 3, 6 hours etc).

That's just a bug. It gets better with newer versions of Lemmy.

As far as I can tell, when I sort by hot it overheats the CPU of the instance server.