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Eugen @Gargron

Temporarily removed trends from mastodon.social until I come up with a better implementation.

· Web · 15 · 40

@Gargron what did it look like before you removed them?

@Gargron Performance issue or just didn’t like how it chooses what’s trending?

@debugninja It had no performance impact (very lightweight algorithm). The results were junk though.

@Gargron I wish other websites were 1% as pragmatic as this

@Gargron besides that better implementation maybe could be nice having to trends, local and federated.

@Gargron Idea: make old toots give a negative score to hashtags, so it actually shows trending toots (ie. are more popular today/this week than in the past), intead of popular toots.

@val Old toots don't play a role at all

@Gargron I know. What I'm suggesting is making them have a negative impact instead of a null impact.
This way, hashtags that are used constantly at the same rate are not considered trending trending by Mastodon

@val @Gargron That'd suck for long-term trending things, take #art or something. Old art posts would have a negative score, cancelling out newer ones. I think the half-life nullifying idea was fine

@toffee @Gargron #art would be a popular hashtag, not a trending one

@val @Gargron I understand what ya mean now, and this idea fits in quite well with this that Gargron posted! (Skip to 10 mins)
youtube.com/watch?v=duHxpSTmwW

@val @Gargron Lowdown:
Rather than giving old posts negative values, the average value of that topic is measured and if the current frequency is higher than normal (measured by a ratio of average over month : average over current) then it's trending

@Gargron Then here's hoping they will be back soon! I liked the implementation and visuals even it was too brief an experiment to understand how well the algorithm beneath worked.

In my mind at least, this is a big opportunity to get better discoverability of instances across the fediverse - if instances would publish their local trends as part of federation.

@Gargron Being able to unpin the box would solve the entire problem, I think.

Failing that, being able to mute individual hashtags in the list would be important to me: "okay, this one is uninteresting|has gotten spammy|whatever, show me something else."