[Meta] how the ranking actually works, with the formula
Asked about four times a month, so here it is in one place. All four sorts are pure functions of score, up/down split and timestamp. There is no personalisation, no engagement weighting and no editorial thumb. Hot — log10(max(|score|,1)) + sign(score) × seconds/45000 . Order of magnitude of the score, plus a linear…
The controversial formula is the interesting one and I want to explain why for anyone who skimmed it.
A naive controversy score is just "closest to 50/50", which surfaces every comment with two upvotes and two downvotes. Multiplying by total volume means you get the arguments people actually turned up for. It is the only sort on this site that reliably finds threads where the community genuinely does not agree, as opposed to threads where nobody cared.
correct, and it is why controversial is my own default browse. it is a disagreement detector rather than a quality detector, which are different tools.
i only browse new. hot has already been filtered by whoever was awake.
which is a real selection effect and it is baked into every score on the site. the vote count is a measurement of who was online, not of what is true.
upvotes measure agreement, not accuracy. it is on the disclaimer page and it should be on the front page.