Recent ≠ Popular
Feb. 8, 2015
I've noticed that the Popular tab here weighs recency REALLY high. I think it's a little too high. At the moment there are a lot of posts on the second page (the page where posts go to die! ;-) ) that have 5 or 6 times the amount of votes as more recent posts.
Overall, the popular tab is where I spend 95% of all my time on this site, and I LOVE that tab. It's always really high quality stuff. But I wonder if it might be time to update the popular logic. Just a thought. Love what you all are doing here.
It is a matter of balancing the needs of people who visit the site very frequently (like one or more times a day) and those that visit it perhaps once a week or rarer. If the analytics are right, 65% of returning users use the site daily. These users probably do not want to see posts from 3 or 4 days ago on the popular (home) page. So the current algorithm is tweaked more in favor of them. Having said that I tweaked the algo just a bit to show what a slower 'decay' rate would bring to to the home page.
Perhaps the solution would be to include popular this week or this month link which would show all articles from that respective period?