2y ago

Is lemmy working on better default sort options than “hot” and “active”?

I’m not really sure where to ask this question. Maybe there’s a lemmy dev community where these kind of discussions already happen.

I feel like the default front page in Lemmy is still severely lacking when compared to Reddit’s r/all algorithm. I find hot and top hourly to be nearly identical. The top 6 hour is closer, but still not as good as what the Reddit default front page is.

77 comments

Yeah same. People complain about algorithms but 80% of the posts on my homescreen are posts from the meme pages. There should be a choice for algorithm based feed.
- I don’t think people realize what an “algorithm” actually is. Top hourly is an algorithm, for instance.
  The advantage of being open source is that all the algorithm logic is accessible by anybody. So they can’t hide nefarious logic in there to push agendas for instance.
  
  I feel that the mention of reddit's 'r/all' algorithm being better than Lemmy's algorithm certainly shows a clear misunderstanding of these algorithms; r/all can be sorted in the exact same ways as Lemmy, the only difference is that reddit has more active users and thereby more content + people filtering it by voting. I also think people in this thread misunderstand 'algorithm' to mean something solely meant to find posts that they may personally like or at least the least are somehow quasi-objectively 'good'. An algorithm for that can be made, but that is not what the algorithms currently in-use have ever been intended to do.
  If someone wants a feed of posts that particularly targets their interests then they'll have to tailor one themselves, just like on reddit.
- I blocked so many communities because it's almost just an endless stream of memes
  
  Same. I like memes but when people are just shotgunning every single meme from the last 20 years it gets a little old.
  
  I subscribed to all non-meme communities and just browse by Subscribed.
- Why not look at new in subscribed, rather than all? - or are you subscribed to memes communities?
- I’m tired of blocking memes. Multiple instances and multiple communities.
- Same, and a few days ago I had memes on the front page from 2h ago and some from 2 years ago?!?
- I am a pretty big fan of new comments as a default sort. Occasionally days old stuff will reappear if comments start up again but mostly it’s new stuff generating discussion.
  Top day or 12 hours for a rough daily digest.
  And new for well…new.

I sort by new. It seems to work. There's a severe lack of comments, which I am trying to do my part to rectify.
- Also when sorting by "hot" I see posts without any comments. Always been a lurker in Reddit, here i'm trying to make my best to comment whenever I have something "intelligent/funny" to say (Rarely but still... :D ).
  
  I think some of these posts actually have comments, they just aren't loading or showing up on the instance for whatever reason.
- I like top by 6 or 12 hours. Usually a pretty good mix of everything until something better comes up. Still tons of memes, but seeing more and more tech/pics/news/politics posts with it.
- Yeah that's something I'm noticing a lot too. It feels like, at the moment, a lot of the communities are communities in name only. People upvote posts when they see them but there's not much discussion happening.
  Which is something that will improve with time, obviously.
  I could go into all those common threads and start making comments but I feel like it would just be inorganic.
  
  One thing that I try to do is find other comments and respond to them. A lot of times it's easier to respond to another comment than to make a top level comment in the post, imo. And it opens up the door to a discussion, which is the whole purpose of this platform

I've found "hot" to be really unusable.
Just yesterday I was still getting posts from over a year ago with zero comments every 6-7 posts as I scroll down.
I've had to just go use "top - last 6 hours" to actually find newer posts with comments with active discussions.
- Yup, top for the last 6 or 12 hours is the best way to replicate the "front page" algorithm most people are accustomed to.

There's a PR open for a better sort algo, so once everything is working well with it, then yes.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378

Lemmy has like a million users, Reddit has closer to two billion monthly active users. It's going to be a long time before Lemmy's homepage has the same activity as Reddit's.
- 2 billion seems kind of high. That is like a fifth of the planets population as active users. I don't think they even have 2 billion registered accounts including duplicates.
  
  A lot of sites state Reddit has 1.6B monthly active users, but really that number is monthly site visits. From what I can find it's more like 400M monthly active users.
  Reddit is still a behemoth compared to Lemmy, which has 1.5M accounts but only 70k active users last month.
  
  I pulled that number from their corporate advertising report, so it's likely inflated. The number was 1.6 billion and I rounded up. My guess is that it's 1.6 billion impressions, not unique visitors.
  
  Bots are inflating that number significantly.
  
  I think reddit is around 50 million daily, 500 million monthly active users. The good news is that the vast majority of those users contribute nothing of value.
  It's going to take time but there is no alternative, we just need to build Lemmy up one day at a time.
- I recognize this as well. Mostly I want to know that discussions are being had about a front page sort, and what those discussions might be like.
  Even without the Reddit user count, I think the sorting should be better.
  
  My only complaint is that it keeps showing me stuff I've already seen, even though I have "show read posts" toggled to off.
- So one in four people, on earth, are redditors? Come on man.
  
  I'm just quoting Reddit. I already said elsewhere that I doubt that's an accurate number. It's probably total impressions or something.

I hide every post after reading them, it's the only way I can have a feed without having old stuff popping up.
- How do I do that?
  
  I'm using vger.app
  You just swipe all the way to the left to hide posts
- Until it's posted on the same community on a different instance. Ugh.

I've switched from All to Subscriptions only, and I'm getting some really wonky Hot posts. The first ~20 posts are fine, but after that, it starts serving me reeeally old content. (Reproduced in multple apps, so it's not just Memmy).
https://imgur.com/a/xfi0xsY
- I had stuff in my feed jump from a few hours old to then showing things that haven't had a comment in TWO YEARS back to showing content from a few days ago.
  There has to be a bug somewhere in Lemmy's API in regards to what posts are returned.
  Edit: I just checked your screenshot. You're showing the same kind of thing I see.
  
  Happening for me too, and I know many others, as sometimes the old posts will have new comments lol
  
  This. That’s definitely a bug. It wasn’t always happening and seems somewhat recent.
- Even on All I'm seeing the same thing with Hot.

The worst part is that it'd be so easy, too. Give me something with more than 10 comments that has more engagement than 10 comments/hour and we good.
- While I’m sure it’s more difficult than it sounds, I like the idea of creating a user created sort/filter feature. Just plug in the parameters you want to sort/filter on (total comments, comments in the last hour, total votes, etc), and save it.
  I imagine users would share sorts that would eventually become popular on their own and get added as a default.
  
  Every custom sort has to be computed server-side, multiply by large numbers of users and you have a lot of strain on the infrastructure

I sort subscribed by Hot and all by TopDay (visit once per day to find new communities). works fine for me.

What would be really cool is a quick personalization algorithm. Call it MySort or something. When you subscribe to a community be able to add it to your MySort by "See All" "See Top" "See Less" "See All by this user in this community" "See All with this keyword"

I almost feel like “New” is the best option personally in terms of seeing better stuff, though it’s kind of hit or miss on how relevant it is.

Can only agree with you! But hopefully it’ll come in due time. More people will help as well.

I am a pretty big fan of new comments as a default sort.
Top day or 12 hours for a rough daily digest.
And new for well…new.

I don't have a problem with these sort options per se, but they do need some refinement. Basically, they need to age out sooner. Three-week-old posts are not "hot."
- I have this complaint with “active”. I like the idea of seeing posts where people are still interacting, but it should have some kind of half life makes it more difficult for posts to show up the older they are.
  
  Agreed - seeing posts in Active from 2 days ago is a bit too much.

People actually read r/all? I always just kept to my subscribed communities…
- I hear that a lot, but it was the best way to see what’s going on all around Reddit. And when I got bored of that, I’d do the top hourly of r/all. That was much more hit and miss, but it was more fun to comment on those posts.
- Mixed things up and let me see some new stuff, I'd do it every few days to get a change of scenery. Now on lemmy I almost exclusively browse all because the content is lacking even with every community in one place.
- I use all to find active communities to add to my collection. Kinda hard to add shit when you don't know what you wanna add. I feel we need a directory sorted by sub count.

77 comments