Anyone else noticing a strong bias towards highly active magazines on /sub?

10A, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

It's worth noting that Reddit itself has always been rather terrible at this. Some third-party clients fixed the problem, but on the website there'd be many subs that would never appear in my feed.

For the purposes of ordering a feed, a count of upvotes should be considered relative to either the total count of its magazine's subscribers or the magazine's average upvote count.

Edit: […] the magazine's rolling average upvote count over the last n days.

GunnarRunnar, 11 months ago

I don't know if you have expertise in the area but I'd be interested in different ways of ordering the feed (including the ones you listed):

• Upvotes relative to views
• Views
• Comments (or unique commenters)
• Relative activity on any of the variables above compared to magazine's average

There are probably dozen other ways to do this as well.

10A, 11 months ago

I don't have expertise here. I do like your ideas, particularly upvotes relative to views. The strength of the upvotes:views ratio indicator should be a function of views, where upvotes:views increasingly matters as the view count grows. 0 upvotes of 1 view doesn't mean much at all. (Note though that currently our view count seems to exclude other instances, as I have a recent post with more upvotes than views.)

Implicit in all of these is a time function whereby recentness is a main factor.

Valdair, 11 months ago

The algorithm is not mature. The platforms have only existed for a few months and have not been stress tested with communities this size before last week. Reddit had 15 years to make that work, I'm imagining it can be done here a little faster.

My browsing strategy has become checking kbin.social main page for whatever the most active subreddits are doing (kind of like a bad imitation of /r/all), then checking kbin.social/sub (which is okay but skews heavily towards whatever the most active communities in my sub list are, as you've said), then if I have time, directly seek out a specific community from a list and sort there by Hot. It's vastly more cumbersome than I'm used to coming from Apollo, but the structure is there, it's really just UI changes (and a few tweaks to the content algorithm) to make this easier and faster, and that can all be done comparatively quickly, especially as app devs get involved and start using learnings from the best 3rd party Reddit apps.

Yoshizuki, 11 months ago

You have two options to get rid of this :

Subscribe to magazines that you want to follow. In setting, change your homepage to 'subscribed' (or whatever it is named). Then only scroll your subscribed communities.
Or
next to the subscribe button, there is another button to block a magazine.

Personally I do both. I went on the magazine page, I subscribed to many small communities even if I'm not really interested in. And I block the big ones that are flooding the 'all' homepage (=reddit =redditmigration ....)

Valdair, 11 months ago

Subscribe to magazines that you want to follow. In setting, change your homepage to 'subscribed' (or whatever it is named). Then only scroll your subscribed communities.

I don't think this really solves what OP's talking about. The "Reddit front page" actually is just your subscribed feed. And that feed does have a problem where essentially only your one or two most active communities utterly dominate it. Posts aren't raised relative to the activity level of the subreddit, only globally.

So just subscribing and block communities/subs/bins/whatever doesn't actually solve this.