A good post doesn't necessarily need a lot of comments and engagement. It can have that, but it's optional in my eyes. While a bad post, with wrong and controversial information, can have a lot of heated comments, delivering a false engagement impression. Votes is much better with that. Going by heat of discussion, is exactly what I dislike about modern social media, where this is promoted, over real value (people who voted because the main content is good), fueling rage-bait promotion. It's not perfect and it still happens, but it's the less bad.

I think it would be cool to be able to configure that as a user. You could experiment with different settings and use the one that works best for you. It'll be difficult to find a one size fits all solution.

Building on this, I wonder if you could add a setting to customize your own algorithms. You could weight a variety of different metrics.

As an option it would be nice, but the current system as a default is fine.

No just show most recent first. Stop trying to be like Facebook controlling people with algorithms.

The problem with allowing third party apps is that it becomes very hard to implement things like time on post. All the app developers would have to implement it for it to become useful and they would have to do it in a consistent way. It would also be (IMO) a step towards the level of spying that seems to be standard in social media.

I thought the 'hot' ranking was a mixture of votes and comment engagement?

I do feel like there needs to be some further tweaking, controversial should have a time falloff so it shows recent controversy instead of something 6 months old for example.

Would it be feasible to expose the metadata for posts in such a way that search queries could be customized to sort a front page any way a user wants to see it?

For example average reading time, total upvotes, total number of comments, and other bits and pieces of data could be used to help people tailor their own experience. Perhaps even a sentiment analysis would be interesting to see: serious discussion, jokes and memes discussion, informative posters, political conversation left or right, etc.

I like "hot" for votes only. Content does not necessarily need to provoke at lot of discussion to be worth seeing.

Equally, I like "active" for sorting according to what's worth discussing in the comment section.

If you're going to combine the two, it should be a new sort option. Going any further than that, and it's beginning to smell like the type of code that sniffs out all the wrong buttons to press in people.

What is the goal? Is it to drive more comment engagement? To ensure that posts with comments outrank those without, if vote metrics are comparable? (Look at me, gathering requirements like a little business analyst, aww)

If so then I would say incorporating some sort of comment metrics (even simply comment count from unique users) seems like a good way to achieve the goal.

I admit I get a bit disappointed seeing posts with no comments. Sometimes the post is cool and I'm glad I saw it. But most of the time I don't have anything to comment on, either. I am kinda here for the conversation more than anything.

Exactly what algorithm would work best requires some trial and error I suppose. And I guess we would have to refine what behavior we want. Would it be better to have a few posts with boat tons of comments, or many posts with a small number of comments? I vote for the latter. In which case one could maybe boost posts with some middle range of comments, suppress those with either "too many" or "too few".

Idk I'm just brainstorming here