This forum needs a sort option like Reddit for Controversial topics.
If you have 2000 upvotes and 2000 downvotes, you deserve to be top on a list somewhere. Not lost behind the threads with 4000 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
Even downvoting takes effort to do. If you have that many people on both sides of an argument taking the time to vote either way, it's a thread that should be looked at.
There are a few issues at play here and I think each warrants a different solution to some extent.
A high volume discussion doesn't earn a place on the home page if it's controversial
I think the right way to address this is actually to just factor more than just upvotes, downvotes and time into how we sort things. We want the default homepage view to be a list of relevant and interesting topics to whoever is viewing the page, (which could mean that the home page is different to some extent for every person. We definitely want to build a more sophisticated sorting model that could help with this.
If I don't post circlejerky nonsense then nobody will see my post
I think that right now this isn't a problem because there isn't a enough content for some to be "never seen". in the future I think the way this gets solved is varying contexts where in the right context any content can be relevant and highly viewed. If you use reddit as a comparison which a lot of people seem to be doing - you can't just look at /r/leagueoflegends but instead at reddit in its entirety. The #1 post on the LoL subreddit is about streamers crushing low elo players. In the context of LoL it's the most important topic, but on all of Reddit it doesn't break the top 200. I think our plan for this community platform is that there are eventually tons and tons of different communities each with their own cultures, rules, and moderation styles. If your content is not relevant one place, maybe it will be somewhere else.
Thoughts?
I'm more concerned with the ratio of upvotes, views, and downvotes:
Let's say there's a post with 100 views, and 100 upvotes. Every single person that saw it agreed with what it said, and enough to upvote, at that.
Should that post be lower than a post with 2000 views, 1000 upvotes, and 899 downvotes?
Under the current system, The latter post, disliked by about half the people that saw it, would show up higher than the outstandingly agreed-upon post that only got 100 views. I think that that is by far the biggest problem.
A popular idea has been to instead completely replace the sorting via upvoting and sort via "activity", so, using your example 2000+ and 2000- voted topics would hold just as much weight as 4000+ posts. Btoh ideas have merit and flaws, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
Even now, discussion with upvotes and downvotes get lost in the back while a discussion about Yasuo is holding the first page just because a lot of people are complaining. So saying " I don't think this will happen" it's nonsensical: it's already happening.
EDIT: Oh, and the 320 upvotes thread in this section it's also proof.
Have the top 5 (change as necessary) be based on upvotes/rating/etc. After that the rest are simply sorted by latest post (by timestamp). Your sort algorithm uses the last timestamp in a parents children as its timestamp.
