jimrandomh comments on But Somebody Would Have Noticed - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Alicorn 04 May 2010 06:56PM

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Comment author: komponisto 07 May 2010 04:52:59PM 1 point [-]

It seems to me that posts are pretty much automatically promoted once they reach 20 or so; some posts are promoted before then, leading one to infer that the editor thinks especially highly of them. (Others, by contrast, seem to be promoted only with considerable reluctance; although it might just mean the editor wasn't paying attention.)

Comment author: jimrandomh 07 May 2010 05:05:13PM 0 points [-]

The algorithm is more complicated than that. I don't recall the exact details, but I'm pretty sure it includes the rate of upvotes, not just the number of them. And while it can be overriden by moderators, I doubt that they're doing that very often.

Comment author: jimrandomh 07 May 2010 05:45:10PM 1 point [-]

I just checked, and there is in fact no such auto-promote feature in the code base. I was misremembering a post in which Eliezer talked about it being planned, but apparently it never happened.

Comment author: Alicorn 07 May 2010 05:23:51PM 1 point [-]

Eliezer promotes posts by hand. If he likes them and they have a reasonable number of upvotes, they go up faster. If he doesn't like them, they need more votes before he'll promote them. If he doesn't see them for a while, they'll take longer to be promoted.

Comment author: komponisto 07 May 2010 05:29:40PM *  0 points [-]

That's exactly what I thought. (And I assume your source for this information is Eliezer, making it very likely to be correct!)

Comment author: komponisto 07 May 2010 05:26:55PM *  0 points [-]

I didn't realize promotion was automated; I thought editors (meaning basically EY) did it manually.

Comment author: Jack 07 May 2010 05:20:21PM 0 points [-]

The algorithm really ought to be public.

Comment author: Morendil 07 May 2010 05:22:34PM 0 points [-]

If there is such an algorithm in the codebase that's published on github, it shouldn't be too hard to find.