Reddit made it impossible to have long-term discussions like forums do. Posts would just fade into irrelevance after a day or so, whereas with forums new comments would bump the thread.
Lemmy has a sorting option just like forums:
“New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they receive a new reply analogous to the sorting of traditional forums”
And Lemmy also has the “Active” sorting method, which says:
“Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time”
so Active seems like a compromise between Hot like Reddit and the way forums do it by New Comments
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
I think Active could use a little bit of tweaking though, it seems like some posts last too long and obscures newer posts.
yea it’ll be interesting to find the midway point for Active to be properly in between Hot and New Comments
but I think it’ll take time to tune it, especially because right now we’re getting a big wave of users and content
I agree. It’s hard to tell, though, if it’s because of the huge influx of new people arriving and interacting what what they are seeing in active, or if it’s a flaw in the system. I’ve been here 2 days now and active hasn’t changed almost at all, this morning I saw one new post near the top.
I think after a week or so it will probably stabilize and we’ll start seeing more posts get higher up.
yea also we might just not be used to the slower turnover of Active, compared to Reddit’s Hot, I’ve also only been here for 2 days so idk, will definitely be interesting to see if Active gets tweaked or if Hot becomes the new default
It’s probably because the algorithm was tuned for a smaller community. As soon as posts got hundreds of comments it likely made things stay at the top for a very long time. Definitely something that will get tuned over time.
Thanks for explaining these. I was wondering what was going on.
Ohhh I’m gonna have to look at what sorting options I use in the future! This is interesting!
