Not sure if this fits here, feel free to remove if not.
I’m sure the algorithm must be working as intended, but I always see a lot of rapid-fire posts under each other when browsing “Hot”. Is this normal or am I missing a setting?
I go by susbribed top last 24 hours, which gives me a decent scroll experience.
I browse New on Subscribed til I run out, then maybe I do Scaled on All.
Use Scaled, it’s awesome. Much better visibility on small communities, so less dominated with samey news.
What exactly does “scaled” mean?
It’s a post sorting option on your instance home page. I basically sorts by recent activity, but normalised by community size, so if something gets 10 upvotes on a community with 100 users it will be pushed much higher than a post with 10 upvotes from a community with 2k users
Ah right, that makes sense, thanks!
I find scaled all gives me a bunch of single upvote posts from communities with <20 subscribers. They really should have implemented a minimum community size filter
Oh, I mostly use it with subscribed, not all, perhaps that’s the difference?
Yeah, scaled subscribed works since you’re sorting a curated bunch of comms. Scaled all is just pointless.
Piefed has an optional feature that if you up/downvotes a post, the posts disappear on your feed. It’s pretty nifty, kinda makes it feel like a RSS feed.
Yeah. I don’t like hot, because it’s only posts from an hour or two ago. Active is generally better in that sense.
For me, “hot” just shows a lot of pr0n.
Can’t do that at work here. Also, I realize 99% of it is AI generated, so I’m not really interested
I’m not really into porn stuff but I don’t see a lot of AI things, personally. I wonder if it’s affected by our instances. I see a lot of real people and some furry stuff.
God, I hate hot after page 1. All I get when I’m browsing all and not logged in is the lemmit bot.
Do yourself a favor and starting blocking users (bots) and communities you will never be interested in. After a while, your feed starts getting a lot cleaner and more interesting.
The internet is too noisy to read everything, so tailor the content to stuff you will engage with for a happier experience!
edit: oh you said “not logged in”, which might mean that you already blocked the bot on your account. Still, the advice stands for anyone reading along
I have tried a lot of the different options and never felt any of them had a lot of value other than New. I don’t wanna see the same stuff over and over again so I’m the guy trolling all new posts looking for interesting stuff.
I think a lot of us, when we were be where, set our clients to “New, 6 hours” and forgot it.
It makes sense that Hot would reflect that, since that might be how a large portion of the user base is finding content to interact with.
Have you tried “new comments”? That works best for me because it makes sure that more interesting (more commented-in) threads are displayed more often, but I neither see the same stuff over and over again nor am likely to miss interesting stuff just because I don’t look at Lemmy all the time.
Yeah, but I do really enjoy going through New and finding stuff worthy of engagement, and try to get the ball rolling.
Thanks for your service, this makes this website a better place 🫡
This is why I use mbin over Lemmy. Better hot algorithm.
Scaled is really good on lemmy for my taste at least
Yea… that’s why I feel very weird about the front page and it felt “broken” to me. Didn’t feel like what a reddit-like front page should look like.
So I just switched to Top-Day, or if you want more “hot” content, Top-6-Hours or Top-12-Hours.
No, it’s like three "New"s all stood on top of each other, in a trenchcoat.
The formula for hot is something like
upvotes - down votes - age^2Often, votes can’t keep up with the square on the age.
Old Reddit used the same formula without the square. That worked much better.
Would be cool if we could define our own custom algorithm, but I guess that might be taxing the servers to much if we could.
TIL
An exponent between 1 and 2 would be better than either.
I had a feeling it was something like that, this makes sense, thanks. Would you recommend a different sorting method?
On my subscribed, I use new. I mostly subscribe to more niche communities, so its fairly quick.
On local, I tend to use top 12hrs, and on all, top for 6 hours.
Edit: note/more autocorrect.
I think instance admins can remove the square, but I’m not sure. Otherwise, given that Lemmy does not have that many users, I often stick with Hot anyways, and only look at active from time to time if I feel hot gets too boring. And if active is also boring, I do something else.
Something else? What’s that? :D
Holy doomscroll
I am still having a hard time picking my default feed. Should it be active or hot? Should I remove read posts or keep them? If anyone has suggestions I would love to hear
Imo active is boring, you get threads of 2-3 days ago where people are posting comments in. I like things to be actual
Top-Day for a daily check-in of what’s going on. Scroll like a few pages, or just 1 page if you don’t have much time.
Top-6-Hours would be if your employer isn’t looking at you all day, and you are able to sneakily browse Lemmy throughout the workday.
I use New comments on Subscribed, than Top of the Day / 12 hours on All
for now, removing read posts will empty your feed quickly. Active is good for a bit, but it becomes repetitive quickly. Hot is good for when this happens.
i think thats just the side effect of lemmy having not that many users.
As well as not being designed to keep you scrolling
Yeah, like certain communities have more eyes on them (so more upvotes) and they automatically dominate the feed, even with a flurry of fresh posts.
The bummer is that once the user numbers get to that sweet spot they’ll blow past it so fuckin’ fast and then shit gets dumb QUICK.
Luckily there is another layer here, and your can isolate yourself to just your instance.
