Right now I have my feed sorted by Hot. The sixth post in my feed is 19 days old, has zero comments, and one upvote. I'm struggling to work out what algorithm is deciding this is a Hot post
Sorting by anything seems pretty buggy now - growing pains, I guess. I tend to sort by "New comments" and from time to time I'll get threads with zero comments on top of my feed...
I'm sure it's going to get better with time - right now we're all basically taking part in an extended load test for Lemmy and federation mechanisms :)
True - which seems to be a bug to me, since that's what studying by New is supposed to show. I do find all the bugs kinda endearing though - reminds me of the internet of old and the time when reddit wax starting :)
I went into my preferences to change it to Top 6 Hours.
So far, after the change, I'm getting an experience closer to the old reddit (before they messed with the sorting to keep actually interesting things from getting to the top too quickly.)
This also is exposing me to smaller but not dead communities I can subscribe to.
Edit: Although, I suspect there might be a bug with Top 6 Hours in that it tries to do that too when I go to my own profile to see my recent comments. I don't suppose anyone knows where I'd look to see if there's an existing bug report for that? I'd expect, when looking at my own comments, to see ALL of them without the sorting applying to that page. Instead, that page works funky until I set my preferences back to Hot or Top or whatever.
If you set your default sorting method in your settings, it applies it to all pages by default. So your subscribed will also be sorted that way when you might prefer that be sorted by new or active. Then you need to manually choose to sort it differently each time you change between subscribed/local/all.
Yeah, it makes sense for those pages. I just wasn't expecting it to apply to my own comments when I go to my profile page as those pages on most sites exist outside of the forum sorting preferences.
I actually enjoy that the algorithm is not that good. I hate it that every site nowadays just throws everything they think you want at you. It's so refreshing to just see what people are posting without that complex stuff going on in the back.
I'm sure it's growing pains. When it works it seems to be the best way of sorting things, but after a while it seems to give you new, relevant stuff interlaced with really old irrelevant stuff.
I like to use Hot for up and coming kinda posts, or finding random communities. When I get bored of that, I normally do one of the Top ones (Day, 3, 6 hours etc).