What I mean is someone sets up a new community, blasts it with a bunch of content to get things started, or sets up a new community bot that makes 20 posts and every other post in my feed is that community. Usually with 1 or 2 votes each and no comments. No matter what way I sort I see this.
I have zero issues with people getting things going within their space, and it’s not a knock against new communities that don’t want to be empty when people stumble across them.
It’s a complaint about the algorithm flooding my feed with so much content from one place that I’ve unfortunately blocked communities over this that I otherwise would have continued to run across and maybe engaged with in the future.
I’m not sure if your first X results should all be unique communities or putting some sort of engagement threshold in place before they show up in the top X posts or something. I don’t really have a perfect answer but to me this is a flaw in the system.
It’s my understanding that there is no algorithm. View only your subscriptions, only communities on your local instance, or the entire fediverse. Sort them however you want. Mix it up to find what makes you happy.
All that said, I personally would like to avoid seeing any account less than, say a week old. Maybe a filter coded into the interface would work.
Isn’t “hot” “new” etc an algorithm? I don’t think there is an algorithm-less way to sort the feed. Even a date sort is an algorithm.
Technically fair point. I stand corrected.
I understood OP to be pining for an obscured algorithm that surfaces “Interesting” content. I have zero desire for any of that nonsense here. It’s part of the reason that I’m adamantly opposed to federation with Facebook (when they finally figure out how to do it).
High level overview vs a link to the code 😉 https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
It’s a complaint about the algorithm flooding my feed
Or rather, the absence of one.
I guess in a way you’re showcasing where algorithmic sorting/grouping, when not used just to promote ads and increase profitability, can have a positive impact. Because they could for example be used to temporarily suppress exactly what you mean, and require a community to stay “active” for longer than a brief flare-up to start spreading wider and wider.
That being said, I find the lack of such stuff refreshing. You after all select whether you want to see “All” content, and even the sort mechanism.
It’s a complaint about the algorithm flooding my feed with so much content from one place that I’ve unfortunately blocked communities over this that I otherwise would have continued to run across and maybe engaged with in the future.
A neat feature could be the ability to snooze communities. I feel like that could help a bit with what might be considered spam (or generally temporary situations you can’t be bothered with).
That gives me an idea for my scheduler (see !schedule@lemmings.world) - block a community for a specific amount of time.
I’ve been using the ‘Top 6 hour’ sort, and it pretty much avoids most of those posts as they have no activity. Blocking the bot accounts that still show up is then pretty easy.
The algorithm definitely needs some work.
