YSK: Sorting by 'Hot' instead of 'Active' will show more diverse content on Lemmy - eviltoast

I’ve seen a few mentions of people feeling like they’re constantly seeing the same content when sorting by active, I’ve since moved to hot, and I’m having a much better time.

  • Bilb!@lem.monster
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    1 year ago

    The problem with sorting by hot, at least on my instance, is that I always seem to wind up looking at a post from years ago mixed in with more recent stuff. That’s not a problem per se, but I find myself almost responding to a conversation that happened a long time ago.

    • Wander@yiffit.net
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      1 year ago

      Tell your instance admin to restart the Lemmy service every so often. We have ours restart every six hours since that fixes the hot thing breaking and getting stale.

      Larger instances might not be able to restart often as it could leave some interactions in limbo.

      • Bilb!@lem.monster
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        1 year ago

        Thanks for the tip! And I happen to be the admin, lol. I’ll set a cron job to restart the lemmy container and see what changes.

          • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            You should know you’ll lose the outbound queue of interactions everytime you restart. I was also under the impression that the big this was supposed to be a work around for had been fixed in 0.18.

      • thedaly@reseed.it
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, r/all would always have tons of NSFW posts before reddit started filtering them from the front page ~2 years ago.

  • Naia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    I started sorting by day because of seeing stuff from days ago thay hasn’t been touched. Active and hot have been broken.

    • Xanvial@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Does your instance updated to latest version of Lemmy? Afaik, since 0.18 active and hot mostly work as intended

    • 'M' as in 'MANCY'@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      For the past two days I actually haven’t seen any outdated posts by sorting “hot”. It’s working pretty good for me in wefwef and Memmy.

  • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Hot for discovery.

    Active to check in on ongoing discussions.

    Use both, they are for different things.

    • kreekybonez@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      it’s reminiscent of the iTunes shuffle at launch. the shuffle was truly random, so with a large enough user base, some people were annoyed that the same artist might get played multiple times in a row. it’s a possibility in true random generations, but it felt wrong, so they fixed it and made rules for shuffle so it seemed more random

    • hyorvenn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Well, all the sort options are rational. You just have to use the one you prefer. How would you sort posts differently ?

      • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I need something that works well for both small and large communities. Active and top basically only shows big communities. I want some form of “top” that’s actually relative to the norm for that community (both in terms of votes and how many posts the community gets). I’d rather not see completely new posts (I often like someone else to take the “first pass”), but don’t want to completely miss content in small communities.

        In fact, right now, it seems like the only way to see stuff in smaller communities is to specifically browse that community? That’s the only way I’ve ever seen posts from my tiny local city community. It has posts, but they’ve never once showed up on my subscribed front page.

        • TeaHands@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You’re not wrong about this still needing a lot of work. But just fyi in the meantime sorting by “new comments” turns up a pretty good mix for me.

      • gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I miss rising and best on reddit gave me better experience. And I have not the slightest idea what a good sorting algorithm might be, I just can tell if it works for me or not. What helped me here, is blocking the communities I was not interested in, now the feeds are much more to my liking.

  • obesity52@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Seems you also sometimes get resurrected 1Y+ necro posts in ‘Hot’, but otherwise yeah you get a lot more post diversity

    • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      I noticed this too but went to lemmyverse.net and subbed to a bunch of new things, and unsubscribed from some memes communities that were posting way too much.

      I have default sort of top 6 hours, works well for fresh content.

  • Sort by New Comments if you wanna go back to the way old forums work where new posts and posts with new comments get pushed right to the top and decay based on getting pushed down by other new and active topics of discussion. If you do it while browsing All, you will always see the hottest topics that are active.

  • LilDumpy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I always sort by All and New. In fact it’s my default feed setting on my Liftoff app.

      • Navarian@lemm.eeOP
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I do this alongside sorting by Hot, switching between the two frequently.

      • LilDumpy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Lol. But then you get a bunch of posts from c/Colorado from their news bot and Right now it’s a bunch of posts from nrc. Haha.

          • LilDumpy@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            No, I’m aware blocking and hiding. I don’t mind it too much. Reminds me the usa is not the center of the universe and usually they slow down or get blocked by my instance since they’re bots. I haven’t had to block or hide yet.

    • LilDumpy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      But sometimes you get a lot of posts in foreign languages. But at least you get to discover new communities and re-emerging ones that come over from Reddit.

  • XpeeN@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    I love the TOP x hours sort. My default is 6 but if I notice seeing the same content, top 1 hour fixes that

      • XpeeN@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I think you’re right. If you want to explore the lemiverse I think all->hot is your best bet.

  • Alperto@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Yes, I discovered it yesterday, but while now the content is new every time, IMO its quality has decreased a lot (mainly memes, shower thoughts or news about Reddit or Musk).

  • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I sort by TopDay and that seems to get me quite popular content, but Hot is also good for new stuff. Love the options for sorting on Connect for Lemmy