[Bug?] Odd interactions in Hot

Hiya,

We talked about part of this in communityplatform, Krylhos, but there are two odd things that happen in Hot that I would assume are relatively unintentional.

The first, which we discussed, is the fact that downvoting something to 0 or below immediately removes it from the Hot listing regardless of its content or merit.

The second, which we haven't, is the fact that new threads are almost invariably moved to the top of Hot shortly after being posted. If you compare Hot and Recent, particularly in the Ideas & Feedback subcommunity, they're remarkably similar despite half of the front page of Hot having no votes other than the OP's autovote. This could potentially be due to the small scale of the community, but it does seem like a strange interaction.

In general it seems as though new threads almost have as much weight as (or in some cases, more weight than) popular threads unless the popular threads are huge in the public eye. If I were to take a guess I'd assume the cause is that the autovote done by someone posting their thread counts as an upvote in the Hot calculation, so in slow times new posts technically have the most action.

~ Daen

Edit: This thread is actually a perfect example of this. I just posted it and it's the top of Hot in New Community Feedback.