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Comment by vxxzy | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a problem primarily on reddit. It’s antecdotal but, it seems good content gets buried. Pick a popular subreddit (say r/videos), and select “Top” posts for “All Time”. You will notice that a lot of that continent is newer and it appears that the quality is not the same. About a year ago, you could perform the same action and get the “oldie by goodie” type content. I think the methods we use to gauge content quality doesn’t scale when a site is overloaded with users. I haven’t yet seen it happen on HN, maybe because the quality of users is “better”.

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I think that's sort of like asking why the list of highest grossing movies is so biased toward recent ones rather than all time classics. In both cases inflation is ignored. to get a "best of all time" ranking on HN/Reddit, I think you'd have to normalize by the number of active users on the date of the post.

Inflation of both the price of a movie, and of the movie-watching population. The proper ranking would be the inflation-adjusted number of movie dollars spent per capita on a given movie.

It might be simpler to look at the share of the population that went to see the movie. That should tell us how influential a movie was compared to another.

Not sure how active users work, but I wonder if that would account for posts that make it to r/all. If a user scrolls past a post, hides a post, reports, clicks on a post, etc., then that should count as an impression. The inflation-adjusted metric would then be upvotes/impressions.

Even accounting for inflation, there are tons of other factors that can affect it.

If movies in general were more popular in some years than others, or if there were new features at some points that cost a premium, it skews the numbers.

That's because the reddit scoring algorithm was changed.

Maybe you could compare old posts against the mean at the time.

E.g X standard deviations above the average = score.

Yeah something like the percentage of total active users who upvoted it may make more sense for subreddits that experience large growth in number of users.

I often find myself wishing you could do top posts by year for each year because those posts for previous years can be nearly impossible to find without going back pages and pages of the top of all time

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