Maybe I'm more excited about it than I should be but I've actually wanted to do that for a long time.
Now you have control over how much something's score vs how new it is vs how similar it is to things you've upvoted matters to you.
It's the perfect way to tune the algorithm. Just let people decide what works for them.
The best part is there are at least 7 different reasonable algorithms that a site could add based on different combos of those options taken to the extreme. All of them are now added without having to name any of them.
"Trending" "Trending for you", "New", "New for you", "Top", "Top for you", "Hot", "Hot for you", "Just for you". Could you imagine.
And it solves a not very well known problem with reddit alternatives. When a reddit alternative gets a sudden inflow of traffic the new people vote a lot. When the majority eventually trickle out and return to their old habits they are no longer voting. This makes the posts from the period where they were present outshine anything new posted making the site feel more dead than it's ever been, even though it likely still has more activity than it had before the migration. Then the few who did stay think that that level of the site feeling dead was the norm before they got there and they also take off too.
This is one hidden reason why these sites struggle to take off, among many, that almost no site addresses. Every migration comes with a hidden curse. Well now if a site, at least this one, temporally gets 10x its normal traffic, on the back side of that influx if it feels dead (even though it's not) people can easily just up the "newness" on their algorithm.
As always if you have additional ideas or requests or bugs you notice let me know. It can take me a while to get to a problem but if there is a problem I do fix it. Sometimes I just want to do that in a more innovative way that adds something new rather than just "fixing it".
We had some old posts hanging around on the front page. Now we have something other sites don't have.
Maybe I've over hyped it. I think honestly for the site right now probably just upping new all the way is the way to go, which hardly seems like that much to get hyped about. The point is I think it will scale well for if there are a lot of users.
Also voting on things now impacts the suggested subs in the sidebar. That helps people find cool subs.