The front of “Active” is entirely two-day-old posts with 500 comments by debate bros. “Hot” is just “New.”
The old fork had a much better Active sort. If it’s not possible for different Lemmys to have different sorts (would is extremely weird, but Lemmy code is weird in general), then it should be upstreamed.
If you’re wondering why it’s like this, it’s two parts:
-
hot_rank is (slightly simplified)
log(upvotes + 3) / (age_in_hours + 2)^1.8. This means every vote matters less than the last, but every hour costs more than the last. A brand new post with 1 vote is equal to an hour old post with 15 votes. It gets even more stacked when looking at posts with higher vote counts: a new post with 10 votes is equivalent to an hour old post with 120 votes. -
“Active” is just hot_rank but with the post age replaced with the time since the last comment. Every comment “bumps” the post; the age of the post does not matter at all until the two day cutoff is hit. Because hot_rank is overwhelmingly just “new”, this is overwhelmingly just “newest comment” with a mild bonus to highly voted posts.
My first suggestion would be restoring the version of the sort from the fork. It worked for years.
Failing that, I would suggest replacing hot_rank with (upvotes+5)/(age_in_hours+5) (you can replace the 5s with any small positive number and get similar results). This will fix Hot, and improve Active, but Active will still be a dumpster fire, because the age is time since last comment, which still prioritizes flame wars. I would suggest changing Active entirely to use (comment_count + upvotes + 5)/(age_in_hours +5).
(PS: I’d go submit a PR but it’d out my real identity and I think it’d get ignored anyway.)
IMO there’s nothing inherently wrong with two-day-old posts being on the front page. It’s always bothered me that on reddit/lemmy it can often feel like there’s no point of commenting on a post if it’s over ~12 hours old because nobody will see it. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like news aggregators, the hyper-focus on constant new content is bad for community building and facilitating discussion.
Contrast this with BBS-style forums where threads can stay active for days, weeks, or even months if people are still engaged in a particular subject. You can get this same behavior on lemmy with the “new comments” sort mode, which I find preferable to these nebulous sorting algorithms. You get a mix of new posts as well as old ones that people are still discussing.
But really I think the best sort mode to use depends on the specific community. It makes sense for a news comm to prioritize new posts, but a meme comm should maybe prioritize upvotes more. More niche and discussion-based comms should prioritize engagement. IMO lemmy should allow for community-specific default sort modes.
(btw I don’t disagree with your point that ‘active’ and ‘hot’ could be improved, I just don’t think any particular sort mode is going to be best for all situations)