Comment count heuristic removed from feed algo
Tim DaubenschützYesterday, we started rating stories higher in the main feed if they had more comments. A comment essentially counted for half an upvote in the rating formula. Here's the commit.
However, I didn't do that implementation properly; for example, I didn't factor in decaying the noteworthiness of comments that had occurred long ago. And so, while upvotes decayed in relevancy over time, comments didn't.
Today, this led to a weird ranking in the feed and degraded its quality. So, I just removed it.
However, we want comments to influence a story's ranking in the future! Stay tuned.
PS: I now plan to make product updates on the site directly and not in the Telegram channel anymore. We now have comments, so the discussion should move into the product.