Punoxysm comments on The "best" mathematically-informed topics? - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Capla 14 November 2014 03:39AM

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Comment author: Punoxysm 14 November 2014 03:36:26PM 1 point [-]

I am not sure exactly what you mean, but if you mean the math of its article rankings then it's important to note that the amount of very early upvotes, the subreddit a post is posted to, the name and preview thumbnail, and the time of day it is posted all have tremendous impact on its ikelihood to hit the front page.

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~jmcauley/pdfs/icwsm13.pdf

Comment author: Capla 14 November 2014 04:27:36PM 2 points [-]

THAT is what I mean. What is that algorithm?

Comment author: Punoxysm 14 November 2014 06:11:49PM 2 points [-]

The algorithm combines recency and total upvotes. It also takes subreddit origin into account so that the totally massive subreddits don't dominate completely.

All the code is open-source if you want to go really deep, but basically upvotes + time penalty.