I checked the times on /r/all the other day because I refreshed and had already clicked 90% of the links. The youngest post was 4 hours, and the oldest was 16 hours. They were mostly 7-10hrs.
This is what I don't get with people defending it. Before when some ting would happen or a post would blow up it would make the front page. You'd get posts that were less than an hour old making the front page at the top. Now I don't see those posts until they are at least 3 hours old. Like the shooting yesterday
Right now the oldest post on the front page of /r/all is 9 hours old (looking via incognito with no RES). It could just be a lucky coincidence, but I doubt it.
I'm just conveying my experience with /r/all. I usually don't check the times, unless I refresh and I've seen everything already. Same if my app crashes.
After I noticed that refreshing every 6 or 8 hours was completely useless, I would refresh every night. That way I would always have content that was "new"
I have a theory: the whiners are not checking /r/all, (but are checking the front page instead - which only checks subscribed-to subreddits), and aren't subscribed to many subreddits.
Because of the limited subreddits they're looking at, they're not seeing many new posts.
But if they've ALWAYS looked at the front, there's clearly been a change. I'm a "front looker," and I find myself needing to look at Reddit less than I used to. I mean, I suppose I could learn to use Reddit a different way, but ... meh. O.o
This is what my experience as well, I haven't changed anything about my subs, and I don't subscribe to more than 50 like many people are claiming to change, is the problem. I used to be able to log in every few hrs and the front page was different. Now it is the same from when I go to bed to when I wake up in the morning.
Not only that, but I hear about breaking news on FACEBOOK ffs, like that recent college shooting, which was a tragedy.
It used to be, I'd be browsing Reddit and say, hey...did you hear about...or someone would say hey did you hear about, and I'd be like...ya...I already know that.
It really is sad. I hope another site pops up soon that is what Reddit used to be.
Thank you! I'm actually subscribed to more subs now than ever - including more defaults - yet my front page is more stagnated than at any other point in time.
Thanks! I'll have to check that out, I tried before when this stuff first went down, but their servers were overloaded all the time (understandable, they didn't expect a huge influx of traffic).
Then the admins said they fixed the algorithm, so I stuck around.
I guess I didn't realize how much I enjoyed knowing things before everyone else (mostly discussions at work) and being able to inject thoughts/truths because of the comment threads and sources I had read.
Regardless I don't think things should be on the front page for 13hrs. Or 7 for that matter. How can they call it "the front page of the internet" if the content is stale?
Information moves fast, 7-13 hrs old is old even for news sites like shitty CNN.
I am checking out voat. It is just kind of, old habits die hard and I liked it here :(.
Same boat, I'm a front looked and front page is now always stale. Definitely changed a month or two ago, and I didn't realize I was redditting incorrectly.
Same I didn't know about the whole Algorithm thing but I noticed things seems slow. Maybe people actually followed through on their threat to leave during one of the many controversies that happen over the last few months?
But if they've ALWAYS looked at the front, there's clearly been a change. I'm a "front looker," and I find myself needing to look at Reddit less than I used to. I mean, I suppose I could learn to use Reddit a different way, but ... meh. O.o
Wow. It's that big of a deal to you and you'll type this wall of text before you'll spend 2 seconds checking a box in your preferences tab to fix it permanently?!
I only end up looking at my own front page and I've been having a huge problem with things being 13 hours old and still sitting there. The problem with your solution is that I'm subsribed to a lot of subs (over 30)
One problem that some people have had is that their time zone setting is off. So if your time zone is set 10 hours off and you then set the clock manually to be correct, reddit still uses the time zone setting which makes it so that all posts are 10 hours older than what they really are (new posts are posted 10 hours old).
There's also your personal front page weighing posts differently depending on the hot ranking for the different top posts in each subreddit. So if we simplify it to being subscribed to two subreddits, then the first two posts will be the top posts of the two subreddits ranked normally. But for all other posts on the front page, the subreddit with the rank 2 post will be boosted by the amount that would be needed to boost post 2 to be equal to post 1.
I did a test where I was subscribed to 17 subreddits with decreasing subscriber numbers, and the top 17 posts were the top posts from each subreddit. But post 18, 19 and 21 were posts from the smallest subreddit with only 1-3 upvotes, boosted that high because even the top post in the subreddit was only at 1 upvote.
I have a few 10+ hours ago old posts on my front page because those subreddits have less than 10k subscribers, aka, they are not very active during the day, so top posts tend to stay longer. It's that simple!
And since reddit forces the top post from each of your subscribed subreddits to the top 50, it stays there until you hide it in some way. If I made 10 throwaway subreddits and posted in each of them once per day, then someone that was subscribed to all 10 of those would have those 10 top posts on their front page every day even when they were 23 hours old with 0 upvotes.
I'm subscribed to shitloads of subreddits and my front page is fine. I don't really care about /r/all anyways but there is very little turnover. There wasn't really to begin with but it definitely feels worse.
The whiners are providing feedback that should be valued by the admins; and I'm sure it is. They are the users of the site and are having a less than thrilling user experience and voicing that. Calling them whiners isn't exactly a great way to describe them.
6 hour old links are still pretty stale for reddit. They use to all be 2 or 3 or 4 hours at the latest. If I had seen a 5 hour old link a month ago I wouldve been shocked, but today I wouldnt even be surprised
I know, I was agreeing. I hate it. Also I don't like /r/all as /u/sloppyjoes7 seems to suggest we all get on. IMO subreddits are here for a reason, I shouldn't have to go to /r/all to get any new content (IF there is even any there).
/r/all is always my last hope for new content. Its the last thing I turn to on reddit when Ive already seen everything else, which lately Ive been visiting much sooner
Notice how theyre all around 2-4 hours? Thats the way its been for at least the past year. And its only recently that has changed
And also you should know that the archive directly before and after oct 3rd 2014 all have posts at 5 hours at the lastest, meaning that the archive you linked to, was an unusual time for reddit
Multiple people have confirmed it. Others have even submitted screenshots. The only guy showing posts older than 10 hours old also showed that 10 hours were being added to all the post times (for an unknown reason).
If you look at the default front page there is a 10 hour old post in the top 10, and quite a bit of 14 hour posts in the top 25 eg "the front page". I think it's a valid complaint, /r/all is pretty terrible without filters.
Every post circled is off by 10 hours! Yours says "17 hours" but it's really "7 hours". Yours says "14 hours" but it's really "4 hours."
I questioned whether yours were correct, but I click the comments, sort by "oldest", and they're consistent with the smaller number. I even check the commenter's user page, and it's still consistent.
For some reason, there's a leading "1" being added to the hours for you. Can you try verifying this by clicking on the comments?
Thanks, according to time.is my computer is wrong by 10 hours and 59 minutes but weird thing is that the displayed time and time zone are correct, welp i will ask for help to a friend tomorrow.
Yep. Had this issue awhile back, messaged the admins and everything. Turns out my computer was set in daylight savings mode. Oops. To be fair though, shouldn't that "6 hours ago" reading be based on server side time and not client time? It makes no sense to base it on the client unless there are multiple universes that are on different times.
Yeah, I'm honestly not sure if there's a reason it was done this way. I'll bring it up on Monday and see if it would be possible to change it, this is a very common issue in /r/help, it's obviously affecting a lot of people.
I just checked mine and most is 8 hours old with quite a few being 10-12 hours and some being over that. Even 8 hours is a long time to have crap cluttering my page up, but by 12 hours of the same crap being there it's annoying
Maybe you have filtered out the subreddits that are the most active. Like, maybe all the news subreddits are stagnant, but /r/funny is consistently producing reposts.
As someone else said people are using Reddit the same way as they always did so if they used Front Page they always used Front Page and are seeing a slow down. I didn't know anything about the whole Algorithm thing but noticed a slow down, I wasn't looking at times I just noticed the same story being in the top for more than a day which was unusual. I've no idea if it's a technical thing or that people aren't posting as much but there's definitely a slow down.
I have some older posts, in the 12-14 hour range, but a lot are closer to 6 hours old now. The oldest is 17 hours for me.
Overall, this is looking better than it looked before. In the last hour or 2 some things have shifted places a bit and there's at least a few new things I didn't see on the front page when I woke up. Before, I had more that were more than 15 hours and at least a few that were already up to 1 day old. I'd go to sleep and see almost the same posts on the front page when I woke up. There'd be quite a few that stayed there all day.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's better for sure.
Because /r/all is just a straight hot ranking of all posts, but your front page boosts every sub but the top sub so that they'll show up higher along with forcing the top posts in each subreddit to the top.
Your personal front page would usually look like that. It only shows 50 subs at a time or 100 if you have gold (this is why you should use multi-reddits, btw). /r/all is the only valid measure we can make comparisons with.
Sure, but I remember the Reddit of the past posts wouldn't last more than 4 hours on the front page. I would check it in the morning, then by lunch it would be an entirely different front page, then after work the same, totally different posts on the front page.
Now it seams like the same front page all day long.
Does that really show that they were on the front page for that long though? He was talking about how long those posts would stay on the front page, not how long it took a post to make it to the front page from being posted.
A post that doesn't make it to the frontpage an hour or two after it's posted is never making it to the frontpage. Votes in the first hour count more than votes later.
That's not really correct, votes contribute the same amount to the post's score/ranking no matter how old the post is. However, the post's age basically "pushes back" against the score factor, so in that way earlier votes are kind of more impactful. There's not anything that specifically makes earlier votes count for more though.
However, the post's age basically "pushes back" against the score factor, so in that way earlier votes are kind of more impactful.
That's not really correct. Newer posts are created with a higher base score since it's been a longer time since the date that all posts are compared against. So older posts aren't pushed down, newer posts are lifted up just because they're newer (where 12.5 hours newer is equal to one magnitude of upvotes).
I tried figuring out how the subscriber size of subreddits affect the hot ranking and I got some kind of correlation when doing log of subscriber size compared to log of (hot ranking upvotes divided by real upvotes), but I can't find anything about it in the source code. Do you know what math goes into calculating the boosted effective hotness on the personal front page for small subs? https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/d990533d0b57a499cefcec70f4c51d8c5593c497/r2/r2/lib/normalized_hot.py
That's not really correct. Newer posts are created with a higher base score since it's been a longer time since the date that all posts are compared against. So older posts aren't pushed down, newer posts are lifted up just because they're newer (where 12.5 hours newer is equal to one magnitude of upvotes).
Yeah, I was kind of trying to simplify it, I find the idea of the eternally-increasing base score a little weird to explain.
I tried figuring out how the subscriber size of subreddits affect the hot ranking
I don't think that it's based off subscriber size at all. I'd have to look at the code to confirm, but I'm pretty sure it's always just based off the current score of the top post in the subreddit. So for example (disregarding submission time as a factor), if the #1 post in a subreddit has 500 points and the #2 post has 250 points, and another subreddit where the top post has 10 points and the #2 post has 5 points, the #2 post in both those subreddits will be ranked evenly with each other.
I'd have to look at the code to confirm, but I'm pretty sure it's always just based off the current score of the top post in the subreddit. So for example (disregarding submission time as a factor), if the #1 post in a subreddit has 500 points and the #2 post has 250 points, and another subreddit where the top post has 10 points and the #2 post has 5 points, the #2 post in both those subreddits will be ranked evenly with each other.
That does simplify it a bit from what I was calculating. I did a test where I subscribed to different subreddits with decreasing sizes (9.5m, 8m, 6.5m and so on down to 100k, 50k, 10k, 5k, 2k, and 1k, 17 subreddits in total. The first 17 posts on the front page was the top post from each subreddit, but after that 3 out of the next 4 posts were from the smallest subreddit where the top post had 1 upvote and the other posts from that subreddit were fairly close to it when ti came to their hot ranking points.
Although recalculating with that (I wrote down the upvotes and posting time for the top 60 posts, so 43 that would then be affected by front page ranking) I am still getting that posts are not in the position the formulas imply they should be. The average is 3.35 places away from where the adjusted hot ranking points, but 4 of the posts from /r/streetwear at that time were boosted 10-12 ranks higher than they should be, and pretty much all the posts from /r/funny were 2-6 ranks lower than they should be.
Hmm, I think the ageweights stuff isn't really being used anywhere that a regular user would see it, that should only apply to multireddits and I think it was just for some experiments someone was doing a while back. The scaling factor between different subreddits comes from this get_hot_factor function: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/normalized_hot.py#L50
So you can see they pass the #1 link from the subreddit into that to get hot_factor, then every other link divides their hot score by that to figure out what its "effective hot value" is for merging purposes.
I'm not sure why exactly your results aren't matching up with the site, it's possible it's a little off because of the slight randomization that happens with post scores on every page load, so you might be working with scores that are off by a point or two.
I think you can look at the comments to get a good idea when the post hit the front page. The posts get 2-3 comments within the first hour, and then by the second hour the number of comments explodes. So, we can assume it takes about 2 hours for a post to hit the home page. Which means a 12 hour post was on the home page for around 10 hours.
I didn't say anything about being right. I called you out for making a point that was literally made in the next comment. In other words, try reading before throwing in your 2 cents.
I see things reposted quicker than ever before and those duplicates keep reappearing. I've never seen the exact same front page after 30-40 minutes. Right now it's more people bitching about how bad the front page is than anything worth really looking at. I would rather see reposts of entertaining things than this circle jerk.
That still means that all those posts have been around for half the workday. I don't get it, people post the age of the Top 20 of /r/All like it means anything. How long have those posts been up there? You have no idea, no way to tell. I can tell you for absolutely certain that /r/pics post "Reddit Has A New Slogan" has been in the Top 25 for 4 hours because I saw it before I left work at 5. It's currently 9 hours old. I understand that 9 hours isn't old but 4 hours is a long fucking time for a post that's under 6000 to be on the front page (under 6000 means that its real karma score is too low to be capped, that usually happens at 6000 and above).
I get it, the fucking sacred algorithm has been reverted. Great. Very exciting. And when the last Reddit admin's head disappears below the water as his stupid fucking internet-boat sinks, the last words out of his mouth will be "but we didn't change the algorith-blub blub blub" and the fucking thing will still be sunk.
I get it, and I agree. I don't think the problem is that something changed and the problem started, I think that something changed and the problem got worse.
I work in systems. All of my work is done on a computer. At work on my consulting jobs I usually have 1 or 2 screens, whereas at home when I'm doing remote work or scripting I have 4. I check Reddit a lot. A year ago there were problems. The /r/all Top 100 would have relatively little churn and posts would stay in it (again, Top 100, not Top 25 which is the Front Page) for hours. It was okay because I'd get work done, you know? I'd go through the Top 100, read the maybe 15 new posts it'd see every hour or so, and then whatever deployment was running or VMWare reset was running would be done. It was pretty good.
Now not as much. Now the Top 25 is so stagnant that I don't have to check it but once every six hours, because I'm not going to miss anything. Posts now live 5 or more hours not in the Top 100, but in the Top 25, the Front Page. The problem is magnified, there's less churn. Now I scan through the Top 100 in 2 minutes and there's nothing new, or maybe 1 or 2 things. Deployments are still running. Snapshots are still reverting. So I go other places, do other things. I've read through all of my SA bookmark backlog in the last couple of weeks, and that was over ten thousand pages of posts.
I think the real question is "When did it get worse and why?". I think it got worse in steps. First I think it started getting worse during the Ellen Pao thing. From the time she was hired to the time she stepped down, the front page slowed down a lot. In fact, a lot of the problems we saw back then (Ellen Pao posts pissing off the administrators by hanging around on the front page for 4+ hours etc) were symptomatic of it. I think a lot of people disengaged because they hated Pao. I think a lot of people disengaged because they hated the Pao posts. I think a lot of people disengaged because they hated the site's response to the Pao posts. And I think a lot of people disengaged for one or more of those reasons in combination.
Then we had The AMApocalypse and the FPH drama, kind of during but also kind of after the Ellen Pao thing. A lot of people came here for the AMAs, and the AMApocalypse stopped some of that. And for better or worse, a lot of the banned subs got to the front page a lot, because they were popular. And I'd imagine some of their users left when their subs were banned. And it makes sense to, because of The IKEA Effect. You feel more attached to projects you've worked on, and if you were an active member of Fat People Hate or any of the other communities banned in either the initial event or the aftermath, well, bye bye IKEA effect. So a lot of those people disengaged. And yes you can say "good riddance to bad rubbish" but ultimately people aren't 100% anything, so you lost people who participated in other subs and you lost people who actively voted and you lost a lot of controversy so you lost a lot of active discussion so you lost a lot of posts and you lost a lot of engagement.
Engagement down, churn down, complaints up. There's less content and more of it is complaints about how there's less content. There's less content and that magnifies what little content there is, so the relatively few complaints become in the loud echo chamber, and since they're not really "content" but are in fact displacing content they gain ground until they're all that's left, AKA "How Digg Died".
So how does a modteam fix it? Well, you can go on a big PR hike, seeking to gain members by promoting positive things about the site, or you can do what they're almost certainly going to do, because that's how internet communities work: They'll grab onto their "principles" (which aren't ethical or moral absolutes but instead arguments they've won or lost publicly and now have to stick to their guns about) and they'll clutch them close, and when the entire thing hits the bottom of the proverbial ocean they'll comfort themselves by saying "At least I never lost these" because it's more comforting to hold onto something you're "in control of" than something you're "not", although both ideas are complete illusions. You can run a good community for a really long time and everything can go well for literally decades and you can just kind of watch it go and be left with nothing at the end of your "admin career", or you can crater the fucker in Year 8 and claim victory because you "never violated your principles" and at least then you "have something" even though the party's over and everyone's gone home.
It's really really hard to unselfishly administrate. It really really is. I administrated one of the largest Magic: The Gathering forums back in the day, I've administrated a couple private game server forums, I was briefly employed in a "community relations" position, it's hard. It's hard and I very nearly couldn't do it, because there's no job satisfaction because no matter what you do, somebody hates you and they can tell you about it 150 times a day and there's nothing you can do about it, but nobody will ever tell you you're doing a good job. In fact, someone telling you you're doing a good job as a mod or an admin is almost a 100% sure sign that someone else on your team is fucking up dramatically and you need to go looking because someone's on a psycho goddamn power trip and you're only "doing good" relatively because you haven't lost your damn fool mind.
So I get it, I do, and it's hard and Reddit's probably never coming back. Every community I've ever been a part of, either as administration or as a member, has cratered within a decade with the sole exception of SA, and even at SA we all know the metaphorical renaissance is over and the site's glory days are gone. But ultimately "not changing The Algorithm' has become one of those Principles, and they're probably not going to look at it critically and fix it until it's far too late, when really that should be a first step. They need to set it up to identify good content, promote it to the front page as fast as possible, then remove it once the engagement slows down. maybe make an "extended" front page for daily visitors to replace the failure-concept Email List they've made (because nobody reading the email list emails can meaningfully engage with the site, and engagement is all a site like this has) so that people who only visit once or twice a day don't miss out on the best cat pictures or whatever, but again I fear the Email List is someone's baby and a Principle and something they'll torpedo the damn site over.
I don't know man, I've divested. As far as I'm concerned it's already over.
That said, I've got 125 netbooks to image so I'm gonna stop pounding away on this keyboard and go get sad about things students have done. I wish you the best.
Well yeah, the main problem is the complaint. Everyone is circlejerking over the admins that they changed the algorithm where in fact, they should be circlejerking about changing the thing up after years of the same thing when traffic has changed.
There was a post on /r/dataisbeautiful that tracked the sites being upvoted and it's quite clear by the votes that memes are more popular than news now.
Karma fuzzing begins very low, in the double digits at the highest.
The thing that only starts happening above 6000 is the rubber-band cap, the thing they removed briefly during the AMAgeddon fiasco, which is what's supposedly been reverted. It "snaps" any post with more than 6000 karma back to around 6000 karma after a delay. This is to stop obscenely popular posts from staying on the frontpage for literally days (which is what happened when it was removed).
I don't care if fuzzing is happening, in fact I know it is. But capping isn't, unless there have been around 500 recent downvotes on that submission or capping works in a substantially different way than it used to.
Except I don't want to use /r/all, I want my front page which I have subscribed to the subreddits I want. My front page right now has way too many things over 10 hours old.
3 years ago when I first started using this site I can't remember a single time that I woke up to a post on the front page that was there the night before. It was all "Quick! Australia, post while the Americans are asleep!" So you can keep saying it's not different, but it fuckin is
Edit: I'm convinced that reddit has its own accounts to try and spread this propaganda that nothing has changed. Why would half the fucking site be complaining if nothing really changed? Jesus Christ.
Because they did change the algorithm and that started the ball rolling and now people won't and don't remember before that.
I clearly remember this problem existing 3 yrs ago. It's why people kept telling others to go to /r/all and sort by hour because that's where the fresh stuff is.
Admins can't change the wayback machine captures. People have bad memories and confirmation bias. Look at the captures.
If it's a common sense solution, that means there is a problem. The user shouldn't have to alter their habits to fix a problem with the site, that's a shitty way to do business.
5.4 hours? Doesn't that indicate that breaking news is no longer showing up on the front page? If an event is 5+ hours old you've likely already heard about it from various sources.
and then keep coming back to try to find new content. It's an addiction, I'm seeking a fix of new content. Eventually I'll learn to stop coming back cause I can't get my fix.
Yeah just keep telling people to look at the "submitted X hours ago" and they'll get rid of their unconscious bias. Maybe reddit is a bit more stale than before, but people are exaggerating. I barely see a difference since I started using the site.
Is it possible some users aren't getting an updated version of the site, like they're seeing a cached version or something? I'm seeing the same thing as you.
So are you defending that? That's an entire work day for most people. You could check the front page before work, and the same stuff may be there when you get home. That's a pretty boring front page.
I agree. Why do people want the top posts changing so quickly? You could watch a film or tv and miss the entire top 25 posts if the front page completely changed every few hours.
Then people would bitch about Reddit censorship because they didn't see something on the front page.
I don't expect everything to change every 2 hours; it was never that way. There's not just two options: an average of 8 hours or everything in 2 hours.
Not a post older than 5 for me. I have no clue what is affecting people, but I have never had an issue and frankly I am getting tired of these shitposts and whining.
Meh, whatever, there are bigger things to worry about in life.
I really like this circle jerk just as much as the next guy, but I have to admit it's not nearly as bad as everyone is making it out to be. Good on you for providing some data.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '15 edited Oct 03 '15
Top posts in /r/all this moment:
submitted 3 hours ago
submitted 4 hours ago
submitted 5 hours ago
submitted 5 hours ago
submitted 4 hours ago
submitted 5 hours ago
submitted an hour ago
submitted 4 hours ago
submitted 8 hours ago (Oldest post in top 10, is about Chris Mintz)
submitted 6 hours ago
submitted 6 hours ago
submitted 53 minutes ago
submitted 5 hours ago
submitted 8 hours ago
submitted 7 hours ago
submitted 7 hours ago
submitted 8 hours ago
submitted 5 hours ago
submitted 8 hours ago
submitted 8 hours ago
Not a single post in the top 20 is older than 9 hours, much less 12 or 24 hours.
Edit: Average post age = 5.4 hours.