A farmer coughs in your face, and then you slowly get sick and eventually die.

I agree that these changes have all been incredibly stupid and devalue one of the few remaining producers of quality TV (HBO), but I think that this is missing the point. The key is this:

Notably, the loss in subscribers didn’t seem to affect streaming revenue. It grew to $2.73 billion this quarter, marking a 13 percent increase.

In other words, fill up the service with cheap / easy to produce reality crap and hike up prices over time. Revenue goes up and costs go way down. People drift away but you keep growing the bottom line, at least for now. The shareholders rejoice and the consumers lose.

And this picture helps too: shows the decay in ranking scores for posts of different popularity (score) over time.

After a day or so, the curve flattens out. This probably explains why we keep seeing posts that are months old in “hot” - if not enough new material is being posted, after the first few pages of “hot”, posts that are 5 days old and 5 months old are essentially the same due to the exponential decay function that was chosen.

That page gives this equation:

Rank = ScaleFactor * log(Max(1, 3 + Score)) / (Time + 2)^Gravity

Score = Upvotes - Downvotes
Time = time since submission (in hours)
Gravity = Decay gravity, 1.8 is default

My guess is that the “gravity” parameter is the issue at the moment. Something is needed to make the decay less steep, so that really old posts aren’t making it up to the top of the feed.

There might be some way of tuning the gravity parameter dynamically based on how much content is being submitted, perhaps aiming for something like “the average age of the first 200 posts should be 10 days” (I made those numbers up, but the basic idea would be that the time decay should be steeper when lots of content is submitted and less steep when content is infrequent?)

Was just popping in to say this! All of their pizza is great but the “Detroit-style New Yorker” is amazing. Pepperoni, Italian sausage, ricotta dollops, pizza sauce, Mike’s hot honey & basil. Or the cup & char if you just want a great Detroit-style pepperoni.