Whats the difference between sorting by Hot and Top?

NXL@lemmy.ml to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 82 points –
9

if it's anything like Reddit

hot = most upvotes recently

top = most upvotes overall

given the rather smaller community and less activity, there is a large overlap between the two

If I may ask, what's the difference between those two you mentioned and "Active"?

I think Active needs some harsher falloff for older posts. I always seem to see multiple days-old posts on the top under Active because they keep getting new comments which appears to bump them right back to the top. Recent comment activity shouldn't be weighted anywhere near as highly as the post being more recent, and I'd honestly prefer a fairly hard cutoff after 24~48 hours.

Wouldn't seem like it should be a problem but the end result of using Active is that every time I refresh I'm seeing mostly the same stuff I saw several hours or a couple of days ago. Hot always ends up giving me super recent posts (last 30~60 minutes mostly) where the comments haven't filled in much, while Active is leaning on too much older content. I find there's no happy medium like I had with Reddit where every ~4 hours I'd have a mostly fresh selection to look at.

I think the problem lies in the (relative) lack of content, rather than the ranking itself. I don’t know if it’s worth it to tweak it.

Oh, this elucidates a lot. Active uses the latest comment for the ranking. So basically like the old forums with bumping and stuff.

That explains why it generally has older threads than Hot. I was confused too.

Active probably has more active engagement so more recent comments probably

I've seen some massively downvoted posts near the top of my "hot" feed recently, so I wonder if it just considers votes, whether they are up or down?

From the docs:

When browsing the frontpage or a community, you can choose between the following sort types for posts:

Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time.

Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published.

New: Shows most recent posts first.

Old: Shows oldest posts first. Most Comments: Shows posts with highest number of comments first. New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they receive a new reply analogous to the sorting of traditional forums.

Top Day: Highest scoring posts during the last 24 hours.

Top Week: Highest scoring posts during the last 7 days.

Top Month: Highest scoring posts during the last 30 days.

Top Year: Highest scoring posts during the last 12 months.

Top All Time: Highest scoring posts during all time.