What about changing how the "hot" and "trending" pages show posts? It doesn't seem like these pages actually provide any value other than show posts from whales.
Trending
Specifically the trending page doesn't have anyone with a Reputation Under 55, almost ever. This should be fixed to encourage other users' posts to pop up on this page. A post Should Not Be First in "TRENDING" when it was posted more than 36 Hours Ago.
At a Minimum, a post from 2+ days ago should not be the first post listed on this page (Sort Order needs to be strongly reconsidered). This page NEEDS to be fixed regardless of whether or not the algorithm of how a post gets onto the trending page is fixed.
Hot
The hot page is a little better.. I've seen various levels of reputation, number of votes, number of comments, etc. However, it's so varied that I seriously have zero clue (or ambition) in trying to figure out how that page was coded because it appears outrageously inconsistent. These posts seem to be listed with more recent posts first, so I think this is working properly.
Suggestion
Similar to how we have the "New" page, I would like to see Hot / Trending to be a mixture of all 3. Personally, I don't think we need to have both a Hot and Trending Tab (the New tab is working exactly as it should, and while it is frustrating, I do enjoy scrolling through it and refreshing the page often for new articles as they are posted). Hot and Trending are so similar that I doubt there are more than a handful of people who know the difference between the pages.
So.. Create a Hot / Trending Page with some of these guidelines:
- The Sorting Criteria should be based on either a linear or log-based value related to 1. The Time of the Original Post, 2. The Time of the Most Recent UpVote, and 3. The Time of the Most Recent Comment.
- The time of the Original Post should constantly be deteriorating the ranking of any post on this list.
- Comments should count more toward ranking than UpVotes (it takes more time and effort / energy to make a comment.. most of the time)
Both algorithms are based on the amount of increase in rewards, over a period of time - I believe. Hot is basically the same thing as trending, just on a shorter term. I agree that some more tweaking would be good here though.
As far as the authors that are hot/trending, that is more a matter of user voting behavior, than the algorithm itself. If stakeholders are not voting for lesser known authors, then they won't be finding themselves in the hot/trending pages.
Basing anything on comments gets tricky/messy because it can easily be abused by people with multiple accounts, just creating a bunch of low quality comments. Being able to do it in a way that is not prone to abuse is actually a really difficult problem.
This makes sense, but I feel that this is also the problem. To your point, the "voting behavior" is not based on the number of votes, but based on the amount of power that the votes have.
This is another significant issue in the community, people with multiple accounts (including bots). We need to (as a community), develop a method to identify and de-prioritize the posting and auto-voting bots. While no individual bot is drastically draining the rewards pool (yet), the increase in the number of bots and the decrease in the number of original posts generated by the community, all of the bots seem to be taking over a recognizable portion of the rewards pool.
The more we let the bots take over, the more bots you will see pop up. More and More People are running with the "If you can't beat 'em, Join 'em" mentality and that is only hurting the community more.
Bots are allowed. They in of themselves are not a problem. It all depends on how they are used. There is also not really a way to stop them either. There are people that are problematic too - it is not just bots :)
I agree 100%! haha
Afterall, bots are created by people. But in either case, each of the "malicious" bots are diluting the rewards pool by generating more votes than a single person would ever generate, in a much shorter time period. By letting these bots continue to exist, we're encouraging more of them to be built and discouraging new original content from being shared in the community. If you can just make a bot, then sit back and reap the rewards, the incentive to build and grow the community for the future is greatly depressed.
The number of accounts/votes doesn't matter at all as far as payouts. It is 100% a matter of SP.
There are bots that do a lot better job at curating actual 'good' posts better than many humans. There also many humans who do a better job than bots.
I think you hit on it earlier, it is not really the bots that are the problem, it is their owners. Whether the bots are there or not, most of the underlying problems are the same.