Feedback on Sort Options

djump·Nov 19, 2013·2 votes·379 views

I've been using the new community site and following the upgrades/progress for a while now and I have a suggestion for one thing that I feel is more limiting to my site experience.

The issue is sort options. We have "hot" "recent" and "best" currently. I find that I use "best" and "hot" most often but I frequently find what I really want is some middle ground between the two. Best just shows the same old largely viewed/commented threads every time and ends up being essentially useless to me after the first time I browse them(although this may be true only to a lesser degree if the community was larger and more active). Hot is nice, but I feel like the hot threads are often too young for what I'm looking for. What I really want is a thread that has a good amount of recent activity but also has some higher threshold of total quality(as shown by ups).

I don't know what the current criteria is exactly between the options so I can't say exactly what the solution should be, but I think something that's effectively a slider between different options would be best. Maybe even a slider between all 3. (although, for all I know, "Hot" may actually already be a chosen point on a slider scale between best and recent. If that's the case a slider between all 3 doesn't make sense).

I'd love it if any of you on the community team could respond to this or share what thoughts or plans you might already have.

Thanks for listening to my feedback!

4 Comments

DaenNov 20, 20131 votes

I think the more traffic we get the better Hot will be. As it stands currently the algorithm for sorting posts is pretty heavy-handed, the upvote from creating a thread immediately bumps things to the top and a single downvote to bring it to 0 or below immediately removes it from the first like 100 pages.

In theory, there'll be enough activity on the threads you want to see in Hot that they'll bump out both of those scenarios!

djumpNov 20, 20131 votes

Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe the community just needs to be bigger.

I have another question maybe you can comment on though:

How does thread "hotness" and "best" get counted? Is it just votes to the base thread? or does it somehow account for posts within and their votes as well?

I had a thread that I thought was important and interesting that had a lot of comments and discussion within it, and a couple redposts that had a whole lot of upvotes, but the base thread it self didn't have as many. And thus it doesn't show up as high on the sort lists, even though there's important and interesting info inside.

It seems like posts inside a thread should count toward it's sort status too.

DaenNov 20, 20131 votes

The only factor for Best is, to my knowledge, amount of votes. For Hot, I think the only metric is the amount of votes over time.

I agree though, I think posts should have some bearing on the popularity of a thread. In a perfect world people would vote properly and the votes would be a perfectly accurate system but...not the case. The important thing is to remove as much control over popularity as possible from the thread creator, because bumping mechanics are a terrible thing for communication.