minimum_wage recently posted a link to a post about link discovery and the ranking algorithm on Hacker News.
That led us to today's update.
Today's update does two notable things:
1. The global feeds have been consolidated into one global feed.
2. Your feed and the global feed can be sorted by 'activity' or 'time'.
Sorting a feed by 'activity' employs Hubski's ranking alogrithm, and sorting by 'time' simply sorts by the age of the post.
In making this change, we dropped the global chat feeds. They were very rarely used.
We think this new setup improves content discovery, and removes unnecessary complexity. Let us know if that's true for you.
As always, feedback is much appreciated.
I like this option for sorting, however, I miss the ability to sort by shares (the 1-8), this was a large draw for me when joining the site. I enjoyed having the ability to choose from multiple "front pages". The current set up may be better but I really liked the previous style for its novelty.
You don't have to take credit. You could have just let it go. But no. b_b, I just wanted to congratulate you on a fine execution of mk's idea. Well partially done! I kid.I have to take credit for demanding that we do something different, as opposed to another cute cartoon.
I think many of us feel this way. They were nifty, but not particularly useful. We assumed this request would follow. It's completely doable. However, aside from comments, I am not sure how useful the sort would be, as most tag and domain pages don't move very quickly. For that reason, we settled on this first. I could see it becoming useful for popular tags, however.I actually liked global chat feeds even though I didn't use them very much.
New suggestion: Be able to sort ANY feed these same ways. Tags, domains, users... maybe comments?
The rank is determined by the sum of a couple of decaying exponential equations, each that are affected by a few variables. Obviously, shares play a big role, but comments are also a key variable. They aren't terribly complex equations. I don't think much good could come of sharing them, however, aside from satisfying curiosity. We don't change it very often, and not by much when we do.
