Assuming 'popular' was the default filter (which shows a bunch of harmless mainstream communities), which sort would give the best impression to new people?

e.g. https://piefed.social/home/active/popular vs https://piefed.social/home/hot/popular vs https://piefed.social/home/top_6h/popular

For new people checking out PieFed we want to showcase the best we have and let people see the vibrant community and great discussions we're having. Which will achieve that?

Please choose one or two options.

Active sort tends to brings out posts with many comments which generally indicates healthy amount of discussion happening. It also hides boring posts tangentially related to politics that get lots of upvotes despite generating little discussion.

Yup. I've always been a 'Hot' guy but recently tried out Blorp which defaults to Active and thought "whoa this is a vibe".

The thing with Active is the order of things changes constantly so after a while every time you go to the home page the quantity of new posts gets less and less each time. I think? Haven't really stuck with it for long enough.

Whereas with Hot it's relatively stable so you just sequentially plow through it until the quality drops too far.

Maybe it comes down to "are we a link aggregator" (hot) vs "are we a forum" (active).

Sounds like the best approach

Yes, the biggest downside to active sort is that it’s ever changing and some people expect there to be a relatively static frontpage like on Reddit/Hackernews. One could have active sort as default and hot/top for those logged in but it also has an issue where a new user could feel catfished a bit.

Make active the default for anonymous and hot the default for logged in, under the assumption new users are more likely to be anonymous.

Active

Wouldn't it risk having some posts snowball, obscuring others though?

I'm a bit curious what hot is, and how it compares to top 1h or top 6h?

If the goal is to be more appealing to people coming in from Reddit, then none of the above and I recommend Top 1 day instead.

Active and even Top 6h often shows posts with zero comments, and that seems to be what people on Reddit are complaining about - regardless of upvote counts, the post being "empty" is off-putting to them.

Also, even if people from the EU/Australia or Canada/USA are asleep Top 1 day would smooth that out.

I just scrolled Active - Popular on https://piefed.social/home/active/popular and couldn't find a single post with 0 comments, are you sure it's not Hot?

Active will never show a post without any comments, I remember discussing it with Rimu

I thought about showing multiple examples e.g. https://piefed.social/c/onehundredninetysix/p/1742577/marriges-rule, which at the time had zero comments yet well over a hundred upvotes.

Though the number of posts that I saw at the time that had fully zero comments may have been an outlier due to time of day. Note that <5 comments is still considered quite low by Reddit standards.

I would still like a most commented in the last X period of time option. I would actually like a filter for links or media that don't have any body context. Niether I think are big options for popularity.

I swear in the past I have come across active with no comments and kinda scratched my head but I do active all. I always though it might include an upvote as being active the same way you can upvote something to show interaction to get it to not show in the feed when you do the setting to not show you things you read.

It was reworked at some point, maybe your memories are from before that

Nope. Im glad you responded because just came across one. this one https://piefed.social/post/1741654#comment_10003781 where I am the only commenter. I am scrolling active so before I commented there were no comments. I really feel active is voting or comments from what I see. This is really problematic because since the do not show what I read thing was put in people like me upvote everything just to clear them from the queue.

I see 5 other comments under yours, maybe you block those people?

As I just pointed out in another comment, sometimes you will see 0 comments, but there are some, either because

• you blocked other the commenters, either as individual or their whole instance
• you blocked another community where the link was crossposted (arrived to me today)

strange. I doubt have all those blocked. take out cm0002 altsand I have maybe a dozen. mmm. I will look over my blocking. maybe I have sh.itjust.works blocked or something. I generally just do communities and people but with language I know I have tried to do domains.

yeah just checked my users, domains, comunities, and such. don't see the user names and don't come up with ctrl-f and the list is not paginated. nothing with sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world. I have a block for gaza and palestine keywords but I don't see how that would effect these comments.

Just to be sure, if you open the link above in a private window, you see the 5 comments, right?

At https://piefed.social/user/settings/filters under 'Instances' you have lemmy.world blocked.

That's not going to go well for you. Lemmy.world is massive.

@hubertmanne@piefed.social , that's definitely why you were not seeing those comments

yeah. threw it in another browswer and I see all the comments. so it must be about me being logged in which must be with a setting. I just have not figured it out yeeeeetttt.. holy trump I had lemmy.world blocked. mmmm. may have had something to do with cm0002 stuff. I think at some point I may have been like. if lemmy.world is going to be full of reposts from other domains then maybe easiest just to block it and see the originals. I really wish blocking was more detailed like if I block a domain I might want to do its content or its users. Like I was trying to based on language but the users could be multilingual and im just trying to not have stuff come up that I can't read.

yeah just noticed it. I think I got really frustrated at all the cm002 alts and blocked it a bit back.

I guess self-reinforcing loops are a feature you can’t avoid if your aim is to show popular posts. Active sort has a benefit of still being able to bring less popular content to front page, it’s just that most active are likeliest to be shown. There’s only so much you can do without resorting to algorithmic content discovery.

iirc in the first case those comment numeric counts still show. I will often see like 1 or even multiple comment listed, only to click the post and see none, but then if I follow up (by visiting the home instance, or view in another browser where I am not logged in) it reveals itself as a lemmy.ml user that I have instance blocked, and possibly people responding to them that likewise do not show for me.

Indeed. Got it today with a crosspost from a world news community (that I block)

I should have explained when making the poll.

Hot is upvotes minus downvotes with a time decay on it. Over 24 hours the effect of the votes wears off until it becomes chronological. There's an extra weight on the first 60 votes and fiddly bits and pieces but that's the gist.

Top is the most upvoted in that time period.

Active is the most recent comment time, like old school forums.