Comment count heuristic removed from feed algo

Comment count heuristic removed from feed algo

Tim Daubenschütz

Yesterday, 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.

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