Deriving the Reddit Formula
evanmiller.org
evanmiller.org
So when the author says, "I realize that proposing any change to how Reddit works is one of the Internet's most dangerous games," he should be informed that it's actually a game he's won before.
(Compare to the apparent HN policy of discouraging controversy, both by the large effect of flagging and through the flamewar detector).
https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conten...
...come to think of it, this explains a lot of the Reddit drama. The Reddit Gold was flying left and right during the black-out (despite pleas not to give any money to the site), and then every time an admin, CEO, former CEO, or board member pours gas on the fire, their revenue goes up. It's brilliant! They've figured out how to make money off of hurt feelings and angry people, and now have an incentive to cause as much drama as possible.
The current time did appear in the very early Reddit's formula but they figured it was computationally much faster to inflate the scores for new stories than to have to go through the database reducing the scores for loads of old stories.
That said, one of the early "mistakes" we made was not noticing the obvious step of taking the log of on the exponential form formula, which ended up meaning we had only a couple hundred days before we started to run afoul of the max float size in postgresql. I also seem to recall coming up with that obvious trick with only a few days to spare.
(for those that don't know keysersosa was the guy who wrote the current hot algorithm)