How the Lobsters front page works
Lobsters is a computing-focused community centered around link aggregation and discussion.The code is open source, so I had a look at how the front page algorithm works.This is it:$$textbf{hotness} = -1 times (text{base} + text{order} times text{sign} + text{age})$$ $$text{hotness} downarrow implies text{rank} uparrow$$The page is sorted in ascending order by ( textbf{hotness} ). The more negative the value of ( textbf{hotness} ), the higher the story ranks.You can skip straight to the interactive front page to help get a feel for the front page dynamics.BaseThe ( textbf{base} ) is added to the order term to incentivise certain types of posts, and influence the initial ranking. It is the sum of the hotness modifiers (a value between ( -10 ) and ( +10 ) of all…
