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[Inquiry] Factors considered in 'Hot' ordering

Sir ArmaMalum·3/17/2014, 7:53:12 PM·2 votes·118 views

As title suggests, what factors are considered in the 'Hot' ordering? Are there any more besides simply vote score and time?

The reason I ask is because I feel there are a lot of factors that can be considered, although it will understandably take a massive chunk of work to balance correctly.

#Things like...
#####Time last updated OP updating can reduce or reset the time factor, popping an updated (not spellcheck, like added content and what-not) back up to a certain extent. #####Views
Views can work for or even against posts in 'Hot' ordering. Think about it, high views:low vote ratio means it's a less wanted thread than a low views:low vote. Obviously this would be less of an impact than a downvote, but it can prioritize new and less seen posts with the same amount of votes (like 1 for example). #####OP reputation
If someone is known for posting nothing but anger posts and hate, a new post by them will probably not contain immediately good things. Now this can be easily abused and therefore should only be used as a tie-breaker of sorts (imho) but it can help!

#####Traffic Size
Not an issue now, but as the CB community grows so will the number of posts and overall traffic. Wouldn't it makes sense to have this affect the 'Hot' ordering decay rate? For example, high traffic time means higher decay rate and lower traffic means slower decay?

I'll add more if I think of more. Thoughts/additions anyone?

2 Comments

RiotKrylhos3/17/2014, 9:25:43 PM3 votes

Thanks for taking the time to think about these problems!

Currently, Hot is determined by a gradual vote score calculated using the wilson binomial confidence interval and linear time decay.

We're definitely looking to improve this over time with using other metric points. We need to be very careful however, because we don't want to open it up to be gameable, and it also needs to be determinant.

Take views for example. A view could indicate either positive or negative association, so it's difficult to be determinant on views. Also, unless we exclusively count uniques associated to an authenticated player viewing it, they could be easily spoofed.

We've considered reputation (and it's not off the table) , but in the past, larger websites have depended heavily on karma and prioritizing content by OP karma. What this opened was a door for ultimate trolls to get their licks in by pretending to be a great contributor, then having the ability to place extremely spammy or offensive content on the front page.