biebler.webm

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   pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 21-Mar-2025 08:41:14 JST pistolero

   in reply to
   @Jonny @dcc @ForbiddenDreamer @Kirino @david @ins0mniak @j @jae @mikuphile @pwm @sysrq
   
   > Hey I got an idea. Back when we were on gab,
   
   :gayfrog::viper:
   
   > there was page that showed the best post of the last 24 hours. Would it be hard too create a page like that?
   
   No, not really, depending on what "best" means. Just the vanity metrics are gauche. You don't really wanna do it by hours like that, though: like, you apply a drop-off for age (PROTIP: this turns out to be the same equation that you use for discounting future dollars at a constant rate of inflation) and then assign weights to interactions.
   
   Masto instances do this with hashtags, but I don't know what they use to rank them. I think it's just how often the hashtag has appeared in the last fixed-window number of posts. (Twitter had this problem with Biebler because the Bibblers never talked about anything else. So they started calculating the "Trending" topics based on the rate of change.)
   
   @amerika has been talking about this kind of thing, like, there's not a thing that kind of presents people with a roundup of what's going on, you just look at the timeline and see what people are talking about and that's fine if you just want to talk to your friends; I think a lot of the people working on fedi software are interested in that mode of interaction (that is more or less what I do). Once you've got a thing like that, it makes people want to be on it: this increases engagement in a kind of shallow way and that pumps up the numbers that excite a venture capitalist but the way it's implemented on sites like Twitter or Gab, it doesn't actually make the place more fun. I think there's probably a way to do this that would give you kind of a roundup of what's going on (at least from the perspective of your server) that wouldn't hose the place, but it's something you've gotta kind of think through.
   
   Like, consider the way Gab did it: trends.gab.com was gamed all to shit. You could watch it happen (especially if you had your own instance because you can ask Postgres things that you can't ask the UI): there were these accounts (all run by the same guy) that would all start posting links with no text and then the links would shortly show up at the top of trends.gab.com. On fedi, there's no real way to bottleneck accounts: anyone can have a million accounts. Being on some kind of network-wide trending page would mostly mean that the guy that is good at scripting fake accounts gets traffic. Stop making it network-wide and that just means that they try to make sure their posts federate. (That guy that did the stupid RSS-to-fedi bots with a "sponsored" link would make fake accounts on other servers to follow his own bots to make sure that the posts were delivered.) So then fedi gets flooded with bots, fedi stops being fun, etc. Even if you could filter bot accounts somehow, you end up with people like-whoring to get on the page.
   
   There might be a way to make something like that happen; it'd have to be per-account. That'd be useful but wouldn't be fun because you'd have no shared context.
   biebler.webm