this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
291 points (99.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35783 readers
1012 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Title.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah - though I had thought that still the one should be higher than the other, even if the numbers are small. In the actual equation, this would be multiplied by a scaling factor of 10000, though. (See the code discussion in the other comments). Though, in this case, the rank would still be very close to zero.

What I had missed is that, in the actual code, the equation is wrapped in floor() and returns an integer. So both are treated as rank = 0 and maybe randomly sorted.

The question is why are rank 0 posts showing up at all? In my other comment, if you do the math, I think that it should take quite a bit of time for any post with an appreciable score to decay to a rank of zero. Yet we see that these sorts of old posts are appearing relatively high in the hot feed.

One possible answer was suggested in another comment -- it may have to do with how often the scores are recalculated for older posts, and if some have not decayed to zero by the time that the score recalculation stops, they might persist with a non zero score until the instance is restarted. I'm still not sure that that is the right answer, however, because I am guessing that instances like lemmy.world (which I am using) have been restarted recently with the various hacking attempts?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Didn't knew the value of the scaling factor, but supposed it didn't mattered a lot when the denominator of the division is in the 10^(-8) range.

Another problem in my opinion is in the log(max(1,3+score)), anything with a score of -2 or less send the max function to 1, the log(1) to 0 and the whole score to 0, so the distributions of post with score 0 should be gigantic without discrimination of a controversial - something score post against something with a score of - thousands. Also, some malicious agent can just use 3 bots to totally fuck all the post on new.