Hey, fellow Lemmy users! I have an exciting proposal to share with you all regarding a potential enhancement to our beloved Lemmy platform. I believe this new feature has the potential to greatly improve the voting system, leading to a more balanced representation of content based on the size of the community and the temporal dynamics of voting.
Currently, Lemmy determines the popularity of a post solely based on the total number of votes it receives. While this approach has served us well, it falls short in considering the changing dynamics of community growth and the varying sizes of our communities.
To address this issue and ensure a more equitable content representation, I propose the introduction of a checkbox or user setting that modifies the filters used for determining popular posts. This new setting would take into account the size of the community and its growth over time when identifying outliers in each community, rather than focusing solely on recent outliers in the largest communities.
By implementing this feature, we can mitigate the influence of the largest communities, which often dominate the popular content section. This change would foster a more inclusive environment, giving smaller communities a fair chance to shine and encouraging diverse perspectives to rise to the top.
Imagine the possibilities! Users from different communities would have a greater opportunity to engage with content that resonates with their specific interests, without feeling overshadowed by larger communities. Additionally, this modification would reflect the evolving nature of our platform as new communities emerge and grow.
I invite you all to share your thoughts, opinions, and suggestions on this proposed feature. Your feedback is invaluable in shaping the future of Lemmy. Let’s work together to ensure a vibrant, balanced, and inclusive experience for all users. Together, we can make Lemmy an even better place for diverse discussions and discovery.
Please feel free to provide your insights, concerns, or alternative ideas in the comments below. Let’s have a fruitful discussion and continue to make Lemmy the thriving community we all love!
So you are basically proposing weighting the larger communities so they appear a bit less in the feed?
This doesn’t even have to be a modification or a checkbox IMO, just call it a new sort style (Hot/Active/New/Hybrid for example).
interesting idea
Lemmy code is open source, so there is nothing stopping someone from implementing this and testing it out on a locally-ran instance.
This is an RFC, OP’s asking for opinions/gauging interest in the work, presumably before the work begins.
Reddit has a strategy for this which works quite well. I’m not sure how it works, but I suspect it’s something like sorting posts in each subreddit you’ve subscribed to, scoring them based on their popularity inside the subreddit (irrespective of the absolute # votes), and then mixing these posts together on your feed. So an unusually popular post in a niche 100 subscriber subreddit can still easily climb to the top of your feed.
deleted by creator
IMO, I’m not convinced that your proposed algorithm addresses the discoverability issue and we may need a broader set of functionality to make communities (and posts in those communities) more discoverable. Additionally, consider that you’re idea for this algorithm is wrong, and someone comes up with a better (more performant and/or effective) one or one with a completely different set of goals in mind. What would we do then?
I wonder if there is a need to bake this functionality directly into the source code for the lemmy-ui or lemmy backend. Perhaps a better approach would be to allow instances to implement their own sorting algorithms and the lemmy-ui/backend just add the API necessary to do so.
