You are reading a single comment by @bq and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
bq
middleofnowhere
Newton's Law of Cooling.
A score (heat) is assigned based on number of comments in the past fortnight, this is then cooled by the exponent of the age of the thread and the total number of comments.
The present cooling rate prefers new items too much. There is a balancing act we've not yet mastered in getting the right cooling rate for small sites, as well as large sites.
The variables in the equation will be tweaked, but we then need to observe them for a few days before tweaking again.
You can visually see it here:
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/NewtonsLawOfCooling/
Posts start with a high temperature (score) when initially posted... and then rapidly cool towards an equilibrium.
New comments effectively raise the temperature... time lowers it (quickly at first, then slower). The more new comments the higher the temperature.
The short answer: As the heat is calculated in proportion to the total number of comments a conversation has, presently new threads are being given a higher initial heat.
This is the standard way to calculate trending items on sites. But... each site has to tailor the variables involved to ensure that the cooling rate reflects the content that site has... and that's the time consuming art of tweaking.