Hot post sorting

Alex Public Seen by 62

Not only with Diaspora, but also with other social networks, as your contact list grows also the number of received posts is growing. Usually, as is the case for Diaspora, posts get sorted chronologically and reading all incoming posts becomes cumbersome since new posts are added to the message stream every few seconds.

So why not have some reddit-like "hot-post" sorting in addition to usual chronological sorting to give users the ability to handle their fast growing message streams?

Faldrian Wed 18 May 2016 1:23PM

Please elaborate what "host post" should be. If you have a problem with having many contacts, maybe just create a "must read"-aspect and add important contacts?

naught101 Wed 18 May 2016 1:40PM

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As long as it's optional. Ideal would be to make the ratio of hot:new posts customisable. And maybe to have quick switches to switch between different settings (hot/new/mixed).

lukas Sun 22 May 2016 7:27PM

In the early days of d*, the stream could be sorted after activity. So if someone was commenting on a post in your stream, the post jumped to the top. I think one was able to choose between this one and the chronological order.

goob Mon 23 May 2016 5:30PM

In the early days of d*, the stream could be sorted after activity. So if someone was commenting on a post in your stream, the post jumped to the top. I think one was able to choose between this one and the chronological order.

I think it has always been the case that the main stream is ordered by time of posting, but the My Activity stream is ordered by time of most recent activity (comment, like, etc).

lukas Mon 23 May 2016 8:54PM

@goob but My Activity and the Stream are two different things. In the past, the activity sorting was available for the 'normal' stream.

goob Mon 23 May 2016 10:31PM

That must have been prior to June 2011, when I joined, then. Unless it was on Pistos' or another fork.

lukas Mon 23 May 2016 8:55PM

@goob but My Activity and the Stream are two different things. In the past, the activity sorting was available for the 'normal' stream.

Alex Mon 23 May 2016 9:38PM

Here is a more detailed description of the reddit ranking algorithm. It is more sophisticated than just sorting by latest activity:
https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9#.ycsasx6o0

lukas Wed 25 May 2016 11:27AM

Just did a quick search on github. It was possible to choose between sorting by updated_at and created_at.
source: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/795#issuecomment-1527834
I think there was a simple chooser on top of the stream, something like:
"sort by: activity - last created"

A ranking algorithm like the one from reddit would be great. However, i think we should also keep the created_at sorting.
I see no actual objections, so i think we can open an issue on github for it :wink:

Poll Created Wed 25 May 2016 7:47PM

Implement optional hot sorting of conversation stream Closed Thu 26 May 2016 8:03PM

We add a switch to the top of the conversation stream which allows to toggle between NEW sorting and HOT sorting.

NEW sorting corresponds to the usual sorting of conversations by creation time.
HOT sorting relies on a ranking algorithm which takes into account creation time, but also the number of likes (upvotes) for each individual post.

For HOT sorting we use the ranking algorithm from reddit. The implementation is simple and can be taken from here:
https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/db/_sorts.pyx