For those who are unfamiliar, the default sorting algorithm on most clients is “Hot” - It’s intended to be closer to “New” than “Top” so people who come to a thread late can have their opinion read.
However…
I personally find it’s too aggressively New balanced. I’ve seen threads where the “most correct” comment has 100 upvotes, and is 3rd from the bottom with a bunch of less upvoted comments on top. In a lot of ways, this is worse, since a user has to read multiple lower-quality comments before they get the same information.
I’m not suggesting “Top” become the default, or “Hot” become effectively “Top”. All I’m suggesting is slightly increase the weight of upvotes on “Hot”, so it’s not effectively “New”.
Agree/Disagree?
You misunderstand what the Hot rank is doing. It’s not balancing newness vs hotness, it’s scaling hotness according to community size. This might feel like newness if you’re focused on vote counts as a proxy for post age, but it’s a different approach. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622 for details.
There’s a couple ways to think about this:
At any rate, this preference toward smaller communities in hot is a recent change and deliberate. While they might further tweak the scaling factors, I wouldn’t expect it to be drastically different. It sounds to me like what you want is Top, Active, or Most Comments. All these are unscaled according to community size and will get you top posts by their absolute metric rather than posts that are doing well relative to their community size.
I’m referring only to comments
Ah, fair enough. My response doesn’t apply then.
have the new scaled hot / active replaced the old? or did they add a different sorting?
is not clear in the discussion which approach they did take
For the latest version of lemmy, hot sort works in the new fashion. There is a pull request with further implementation details linked in the GitHub issue.
thank you