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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • There is !reddead@lemmy.world, but it’s pretty quiet. You could try posting there to get some of that content going. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle, though - the lack of content drives people away, leading to less content.

    I will say that even in smaller communities I find that people are quite helpful here with questions, which is great.

    It does seem like the post reddit boom of interaction and growth has waned, thought, and many of the communities that were starting to grow are now much quieter than they were a few weeks ago. I think that the lemmy.world downtime for so long really drove people away, which is a shame.






  • And this picture helps too: shows the decay in ranking scores for posts of different popularity (score) over time.

    After a day or so, the curve flattens out. This probably explains why we keep seeing posts that are months old in “hot” - if not enough new material is being posted, after the first few pages of “hot”, posts that are 5 days old and 5 months old are essentially the same due to the exponential decay function that was chosen.

    That page gives this equation:

    Rank = ScaleFactor * log(Max(1, 3 + Score)) / (Time + 2)^Gravity
    
    Score = Upvotes - Downvotes
    Time = time since submission (in hours)
    Gravity = Decay gravity, 1.8 is default
    

    My guess is that the “gravity” parameter is the issue at the moment. Something is needed to make the decay less steep, so that really old posts aren’t making it up to the top of the feed.

    There might be some way of tuning the gravity parameter dynamically based on how much content is being submitted, perhaps aiming for something like “the average age of the first 200 posts should be 10 days” (I made those numbers up, but the basic idea would be that the time decay should be steeper when lots of content is submitted and less steep when content is infrequent?)