More specifically, how does the ‘hot’ sort option work? It seems to be based on what posts I look at (I think) unlike top and new which are the same for everyone. Is this true? And if so, who controls how the algorithm works? My home instance? Or the base lemmy code?
It’s not based on what posts you look at. It’s the same for everyone. See the documentation here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
Hot is like Top but uses the time since posting to scale the ranking to keep newer content towards the top.
It really doesn’t seem to work as intended, I see months old posts under hot for no apparent reason.
That was a known bug in 0.18.2. It looks like your account is on lemmy.world which has very recently updated to 0.18.3, are you still seeing the issue?
I will give it a look, I haven’t been using hot due to that issue
Even on 0.18.3, something is… off. There seems to be some sort of preference for content which is new and all coming from the same community within a short amount of time; for example, there’s a local community which had the moderator post a flurry of content within a short time frame, all with no upvote ranks to speak of (1 or 2) but it flooded Local/Hot for every single post which I ended up blocking last night (in fact, it was 2 of them sadly - unrelated communities).
They did nothing wrong (not spammers, etc. - just bootstrapping and adding content to their communities), but Lemmy’s Local/Hot algo prioritized flooding my eyeballs with every single post they made in entire pages of content simply because of whatever is wrong in code, not taking into account votes or ranks somehow. My only choice is to block them to stop the madness, not because I dislike their content per se.
