You might remember this post where I asked about how sorting by “Hot” gives you a lot of new posts that were posted in quick succession, making it look like “New”.
I was recommend by a few to use “Scaled”, so recently I did. Except this felt even worse: I saw new posts that were posted in succession with 0 upvotes, one having 1 upvote.
Isn’t this weird? Or am I doing it wrong?
No, it is not weird. Scaled, according to the docs, is like Hot, but less active communities’ posts get a boost.
Edit: here’s a bit more detail
The exact function to calculate the scaled rank is this one:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION scaled_rank (score numeric, published timestamp with time zone, users_active_month numeric) RETURNS float AS $$ BEGIN -- Add 2 to avoid divide by zero errors -- Default for score = 1, active users = 1, and now, is (0.1728 / log(2 + 1)) = 0.3621 -- There may need to be a scale factor multiplied to users_active_month, to make -- the log curve less pronounced. This can be tuned in the future. RETURN (hot_rank (score, published) / log(2 + users_active_month)); END;The hot rank is calculated like this:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION hot_rank (score numeric, published timestamp without time zone) RETURNS integer AS $$ BEGIN -- hours_diff:=EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (timezone('utc',now()) - published))/3600 RETURN floor(10000 * log(greatest (1, score + 3)) / power(((EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (timezone('utc', now()) - published)) / 3600) + 2), 1.8))::integer; END;Exactly. In a small community that usually doesn’t see much activity, if a post gets even one upvote, scaled might consider it relevant.
But these are 3 posts with 0 upvotes that recently have been posted, how is that “Hot”, let alone at the top of “Hot”?
“Hot” is a mix of recency and votes. The posts in your example score low on votes but very high on recency (<1 hour ago) and extremely high on the size scaling because that community ( !hp_fanfiction@literature.cafe ) is tiny with only two subscribers.
You may consider Scaled to be a more appropriate sorting option for when you’re viewing the communities that you’ve subscribed to, rather than the firehose of /all
It’s starting to make sense, thanks. I’ll try to keep scaled to my subscriptions, although I like “All” for the variety.
Ranking:
Hot = Upvotes / Age
Scaled = Hot / Community size
Hpfanfiction must be a fresh community with no one joined yet and the creator posting a lot immediately. Alternatively, it just federated to LW.
On hot, I guess you managed to open it with the exact same second?
But 0 upvotes divided by any age is still 0. So Hot = 0, and Scaled would then be 0 divided by community size, and therefore also still 0.
It was in response to “Scaled is like Hot”, so I wasn’t looking at the Hot page at that moment, but I tried to convey how it doesn’t make sense that a post with 0 upvotes get to the top of Scaled
If you want a bit more detail, look at my edit. The functions to calculate the hot and scaled for content is now there.
You’re making assumptions about how they work based on your intuition - luckily we don’t need to do much guesswork about how the sorts are actually implemented because we can just look at the code to check:
CREATE FUNCTION r.scaled_rank (score numeric, published timestamp with time zone, interactions_month numeric) RETURNS double precision LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE PARALLEL SAFE -- Add 2 to avoid divide by zero errors -- Default for score = 1, active users = 1, and now, is (0.1728 / log(2 + 1)) = 0.3621 -- There may need to be a scale factor multiplied to interactions_month, to make -- the log curve less pronounced. This can be tuned in the future. RETURN ( r.hot_rank (score, published) / log(2 + interactions_month) );And since it relies on the hot_rank function:
CREATE FUNCTION r.hot_rank (score numeric, published timestamp with time zone) RETURNS double precision LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE PARALLEL SAFE RETURN -- after a week, it will default to 0. CASE WHEN ( now() - published) > '0 days' AND ( now() - published) < '7 days' THEN -- Use greatest(2,score), so that the hot_rank will be positive and not ignored. log ( greatest (2, score + 2)) / power (((EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (now() - published)) / 3600) + 2), 1.8) ELSE -- if the post is from the future, set hot score to 0. otherwise you can game the post to -- always be on top even with only 1 vote by setting it to the future 0.0 END;So if there’s no further changes made elsewhere in the code (which may not be true!), it appears that
hothas no negative weighting for votes <2 because it uses the max value out of2andscore + 2in its calculation. If correct, those posts you’re pointing out are essentially being ranked as if their voting score was 2, which I hope helps to explain things.edit: while looking for the function someone else beat me to it and it looks like possibly the
hot_rankfunction I posted may or may not be the current version but hopefully you get the idea regardless!Thanks! That clears up a lot. Appreciate the paraphrasing too.
Small difference: I made the assumption that the simplified version was exactly how it works, as in, taking the comment at face value.
Fair enough - glad you’ve found it helpful (Y)
It’s a simplified version they had explained somewhere in the documentation. Details like that may be left out.