1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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.
On hot, I guess you managed to open it with the exact same second?
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
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 hot has no negative weighting for votes <2 because it uses the max value out of 2 and score + 2 in 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_rank function 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.
You're making assumptions about how they work based on your intuition
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)
If you want a bit more detail, look at my edit. The functions to calculate the hot and scaled for content is now there.
It's a simplified version they had explained somewhere in the documentation. Details like that may be left out.
Scaled is unfortunately useless for /all, it gets flooded with posts from communities with like 5 subscribers. I don't understand why they didn't implement a simple minimum upvote filter on it, would have made it so much more useful.