Medium’s front page lists most popular articles, based on organic social energy.
If the trending page was influenced by
upvotes + resteems + comments/upvotes
moreso than
voter weight and payout
It would be a more genuine metric of a post trending. The comment aspect would have to take spam possibility into account.
Yes! And then they create a section called, "WHALE PICKS" which is the same as Medium's Staff Picks!!!!!
THE WHALES ARE STEEMIT'S STAFF! They do not decide what trends, but rather, what the STEEMIT STAFF HAS PICKED OUT!!! It's a genius idea!!!
Yes, and keep the whale name, because the ocean theme is actually pretty cute and creates the steemit culture
agreed
also factoring user rep into this would remove the spam factor. users over 5o rep aren't likely to post bullshit responses to get their posts viewed. Comments with a certain amount of unique words would be good. I don't know f-all about these types of algorithms and how other sites pik organic trending metrics. I think what we suggest here is entirely possible. I'm not sure how difficult or time-consuming it would be for devs.
edit: also adding more time to wait to post a comment could help. because people could add more by editing if needed, and editing would require a human.
Actually having rep factor into the rewards in some way in addition to SP would also be great if it could be done.
having a two-fold rep system that splits posts and comments could be used to discount spam in algorithms, upvotes on posts could show to us users as the numerical rep score, while upvotes/flags on comments could simply show as a coloured traffic light colour behind the post score.and as an added bonus it would also encourage commenting again.
I think that it would be better if the reputation system was only influenced by popularity of user's posts rather than the amount of Steem Power. Atm, you can "buy" Rep by buying SP.
Also, post count should be measured by the a amount of one's blog posts not comments. There should be different counter for the comments.
Yes!! How do we get this done??!?
This would SOLVE A HUGE PROBLEM.
Being the prolific muser that I am, I was thinking of the possibility of an option to disable replies less than 100 words or so. This also allows authors who don't want to read 'Great post thanks' type comments won't get them and the ones who like them can. and it can be a way of filtering which posts would apply for a 'most comments' filter without penalizing people who want to have fun and post short quips and photos. If rep of user could factor in to the comments considered for upping post visibility that helps too. of course, this is all very easy for me to say. Those who can't do; think!
We humans work to shut down bot comments! All downvoted comments are not taken into account with the trending aspect.
It still has vulnerability to Sybil type attacks. If all it took to make it to the top of the trending page was a high volume of comments, you would start to see massive groups of people just generate a lot of relevant although not very helpful comments. Enough to not be considered spam, but still up the count.
One of the biggest differences between medium and Steemit is the money part. When you introduce the money part, you introduce all kinds of skewed incentives which corrupt a lot of the algorithms that work on a purely content driven site where all the users care about is content.
Good points @timcliff there is almost always a downside.
It wouldn't work just on comments alone, no. Also when something reaches the height of the trending page, more people will notice if people exploited functions to get there. If the rep of the user needs to be above 50 or 60 for comments to count could that work? theres the reputational risk if people see a user spamming basically. And if it makes the trending page, it will be seen, and maybe flagged
Reputation is a great feature, but not everyone who participates is going to have a high reputation score. Curators and investors who may not post and comment will have no say on what makes it on the trending page.
I see (and ty for explanation) At a certain point then trending will actually mean 'promoted'. As any curator who has a hefty weight is going to be someone who earned the SP from posting, but more likely a whale, or investor. The latter would basically pay to influece the trending page, sure, and that is great. But it woud be misleading to have that as 'trending' tab
I noticed that there's the active and hot sections which don't seem to reflect post activity very well. Further developing the tags in more specific and effective ways would help. Not necessary to shut-out other means of influencing content noticeability.
i can barely guess at how the 'hot' and 'active' tabs filter.
Replying to your lower comment
I don't know what active does but Hot is a pretty simple algorithm. The posts start in the same order as New (newest first), but each time a post gets an upvote, it gets a boost back toward the top of the list. How much of a boost is determined but the SP and weight of the upvote. Posts that don't get upvotes will slide down fast, while posts that continue to get upvotes will stay near the top, then eventually slide down as well.
I'm pretty sure active puts posts that were either just created, edited or had a comment added put at the top of the list, which then just continues to scroll until the next edit or comment, again just bumping to the top of the list.
Simply hitting edit and update post with no changes will put you to the top of active too.
could there be a cheetah bot that focuses on content under trending? it would catch copy pasta in comments that might otherwise look like a human response
It would become extremely complicated and political to police. It would also be very subjective. At what point is a comment a legitimate comment vs an attempt to game the system? Should 20 minnows who all say something like "I really like what you did. Great post!" be flagged?
I was musing about if comments with minimum word count and upvotes of comments could be factored in as well. not simply number of comments. So maybe it wouldnt be necessary to flag things like that. Rather, for example, if someone resonded to a post about philosophy from something they copypasta from a philosophy blog they didnt write, just to make comments. (but I realize it's still complicating and much work)
Any solutions dont make sense without steemit having a direction as either blogging or short-form (or split up as both with different guidlines). Posting guidines and expectations can mean implementing other features like minimum word count replies, which right now, would be limiting.