Hello all,
Wanted to open a discussion on Lemmy’s post sorting options right now. I don’t have any experience with implementing this type of thing but right now the algorithm appears… Off? For example, ‘Active’ gives me a lot of posts over a day old but ‘Hot’ may as well be ‘New’ i.e. more recent posts with little engagement.
I don’t know if it’s due to Lemmy still picking up steam or a fundamental flaw with the algorithm. Like I said, I’m really curious to hear the opinions of those more knowledgeable.
I use “Top Day” and seem to be quite happy with it.
I just switched to this and it seems to be what I expect from ‘Hot’. Hot seems to include popular posts from weeks to months ago and that’s just not the definition of hot, really.
Nobody said it’s hot AND fresh
Thanks for the suggestion! This works much better!
My biggest issue is that posts stream in regardless of the sorting option you have picked. So, even if I am sorting by ‘hot’ posts I’ll get a stream of posts that where made less than a minute ago.
Absolutely my biggest annoyance as well.
I’ve been doing top of today.
I want to make 100% sure that in “Hot” you don’t just see big communities. I want to always see that one post from that one community with 1 user right at the top. So they should weight by community size.
I’m not sure about the algos, but I’d kill if it would at least remember my choices between page refreshes.
Although it’s a little less convenient than just remembering across refreshes, you can set a default sort in your profile if there’s a particular sort you like.
That being said I find myself hopping between Top Day and Hot so I can only start on one or the other. Would be nice if it just remembered.
Remembering “subscribed” instead of “local” would be nice too.
I think having “Active” as default is unfortunate too, if a new user sees the top post was from two days ago they might assume the whole platform is inactive, since they can’t see that a new comment was added just seconds ago from that page view. Having “Hot” as the default would probably be better since those are usually newer posts with at least a few comments.
None of the megaguides I’ve seen actually show how to use the mobile apps/sites. I’ve been told what the Fediverse is and how it works enough times to build the backend myself, but I have no clue how to navigate.
That might be true. I’m glad you can set your own defaults but having the starting fknfkg to be a generally useful one is a good idea. Im curious if people find Local to be a good default? Subscribed doesn’t make sense I guess because you start out with no subscriptions. But maybe all is nice to find new communities and explore?
Maybe instance owners could have a recommended subscriptions option that new users could default to. That way new users can experience seeing content on other instances right away. Different instances with different standards could customize their new user experience.
Sorting by new comments gives posts with no comments! Pretty big annoyance for me tbh.
@programming
@WatTyler
There is a demo of an algorithmic timeline thingy for mastodon at https://fedifeed.herokuapp.com/ and I really really like how it has a bunch of sliders for fine-tuning. The time penalty in particular is very important.Would be absolutely awesome to have the same on lemmy.
Edit: Lemmy doesn’t show my picture…
Something feels wrong but I normally just browsed “best” on reddit and that was a curated list of top subs. So it’s weird to me to sort Lemmy by “Hot” and get a ton of posts from random communities with no upvotes or replies. Which they are obviously not HOT as no one has engaged with them except the OP.
I feel like something is “off” with the way it is curating things.
They need mark as read too. I keep seeing the same stuff.
If it helps, there’s a “Show Read Posts” toggle in your account settings- I believe “Read” is based on having ⬆️ / ⬇️ed the post.
Nice! Thanks
Can someone explain why if I choose All/Hot the first page will look “normal” for a bit, but then it starts updating/scrolling constantly? Like I can’t keep my place, new items are continuously being added and I can’t even finish reading a headline. I don’t see any settings to prevent that. What am I doing wrong?
I think this is a feature done horribly wrong
I think it’s a UI bug.
I don’t know a lot about Lemmy’s implementation but a difficult thing to deal with is how do you “rank” a post? Like you have a small community of a few active people, but there’s federation with a massive community with lots of users - which posts are “better”?
Worse still, there’s an inherent lag/delay with the federated posts, a post that was very active in the last hour might have only been federated to the server in the last 5mins - so what do you do, do you bubble up all those posts or ignore it because there’s more recent and relevant things?
The kicker is that these decision points aren’t instant either, any system that’s doing this kind of ranking will have an algorithm as you describe, but that algorithm will take time to process all the data, while the data is coming in batches as each server federates with each other. It’s a difficult problem to solve.
Like you have a small community of a few active people, but there’s federation with a massive community with lots of users - which posts are “better”?
I think this is where federation will get the most interesting. It would be cool to add/remove weight to some instances and communities. And each instance’s software could handle this differently with different algorithms.
I’m completely speculating because I’m high. I have no idea what Lemmy’s roadmap looks like. Would be cool though man.
It’s all open source, you can look at the algorithms here.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/index.html
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
I’m aware, what I am getting at is that there’s multiple “Right” answers to solving what is essentially a very difficult problem.
I see this as a really clear win over the likes of Reddit and Facebook of making the algorithm more understandable to users so they see WHY they’re being fed the information they’re getting.
I wish I could change the default comment sorting
Also defaulting to “All” communities would be nice :)
Reddit’s top hourly was one of my favorite ways to browse. They need to implement that here. Just show me the top posts from the last hour.
You can do Top Day with Lemmy now. Maybe not enough content yet for hourly.
There’s always enough content for top hourly. Top hourly is not enough
