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By default it gets a sort factor of 1. I’m surprised it didn’t have a huge impact on the front page at that value, but it should nudge things. For fun, bump it to 5 and take a look. A quick video on doing that
The math behind the scenes uses some logarithms, but with all settings at default the sort alg is roughly:
score^2 * comments / age * bumptime * distance
Read as division having a higher operator precedence than multiplication.
When you change your sort settings you are changing the powers. Score has a setting default of 1 like everything else. But it has a back-end exponent multiplier of 2. This helps counter the fact that “time” is basically counted twice between age and bumptime.
If you want to interact with posts that have more comments, increase your comment factor.
This also means that getting discussion going in a thread increases the post's visibility. If you’re making a link post, it's not a bad idea to leave your own comment about it. There’s a small fudge factor: posts with zero comments are treated as having one so we don’t take a log of zero or multiply by zero. Adding the first comment to a link post basically doubles its sort calculation. It also increases the chance someone else comments, even just to compare thoughts.
I’m thinking about giving bump a small upward tick, so let me know your thoughts. I think it needs a little more edge. As it stands, commenting on something a few days old will bring it back to the front, but adding something new to a post every day can’t compete with brand-new posts. That makes long-lived threads less viable than just making new posts. I want both to work well. Having added the comment counts factor might already be enough but I'm also open to increasing the bump factor a little.
I also want to get comment sorting using the same alg as posts. In particular, I want bump for comments that get commented on -- likely up the whole tree—so you can have sub-threads inside threads. The vision is to create something 4chan can’t: with nested comments, we can have discussions within discussions that float to the top based on activity. And with votes, it’s not entirely supply-side.
4chan is driven by supply: topics people can easily contribute to prevail. Reddit is driven by demand: what do people want to see? By having both, you can get 4chan-style threads where content people also want to see gets a little algorithmic edge from votes. That puts more eyes on it and brings in more contributions. Recent and frequent contributions increase visibility for people who vote. The advantage goes to topics that do both: easy to contribute to and valuable to read.
Let me know your thoughts.
