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.)