That’s the Active sort algorithm, which I restored to the original Hexbear Active sort after we merged back to upstream lemmy. See file up.sql for the actual algorithm. It’s unfortunately rather difficult to read for those not technically inclined, and kinda hard to understand clearly even for those who can read it. I came to understand it by trying out some basic examples to understand how it worked.
Basically, for several hours after a post, recent comments adjust the time of the post forward to make it come off as more recent, which pushes its rank higher. Right after the post is made, a comment can adjust the post time into the future, maximizing this effect. This effect fades away after several hours, though, such that posts 8 or 9 hours old or older have trouble rising to the top of the feed when competing with newer posts.
https://github.com/hexbear-collective/lemmy/pull/6
That’s the Active sort algorithm, which I restored to the original Hexbear Active sort after we merged back to upstream lemmy. See file up.sql for the actual algorithm. It’s unfortunately rather difficult to read for those not technically inclined, and kinda hard to understand clearly even for those who can read it. I came to understand it by trying out some basic examples to understand how it worked.
Basically, for several hours after a post, recent comments adjust the time of the post forward to make it come off as more recent, which pushes its rank higher. Right after the post is made, a comment can adjust the post time into the future, maximizing this effect. This effect fades away after several hours, though, such that posts 8 or 9 hours old or older have trouble rising to the top of the feed when competing with newer posts.
Time traveling posts