Why is the lemmy hot sort seemingly so bad? After the first couple of posts it turns into new posts with no votes, sometimes the same new post multiple times back to back to different communities, and sometimes posts with negative points. I came across a series of posts today with 1 upvote (poster) and 6 downvotes. I don’t get how that can be considered “hot”
I mean, the good news is I saw this post (currently brand new with very few votes) right away in “hot”. So that’s nice, I guess?
That said, I have no idea. If I were to hazard a guessz I wonder if the algorithm doesn’t have any logic for dealing with outlier vote counts, and brand new posts all end up falling into that outlier case.
Switch to Top -> 6 hours. So much better
The issue with this is I also want to be able to see smaller posts that are gaining traction. I wouldn’t mind posts with 2 or 3 upvotes (votes from users other than the poster), but new posts with no upvotes should not be considered hot, and especially not posts with negative points.
This is hot
Hot is likely just a blend between Active and New to give you a good balance of popular content and encourage engagement with posts that were just posted. The algorithm could definitely be improved, but I’d bet as Lemmy grows in content and content creators Hot sorting will get better too
I think the problem is there isn’t enough traffic on Lemmy and not that the filter doesn’t work. I think it is just some equation that balances how recent it is with how many upvotes it has gotten.
Although if that is the case you might get some oddities like 5 upvotes on a post made 5 minutes ago would have the upvote to time ratio be extremely good and be higher than it seems like it should be.
