How are Popular Comments chosen? February 16, 2025 9:07 AM Subscribe
Reading the Popular Comments is the best way to find the hidden gems of knowledge and deep dives from awesome people on this site.
But I've always wondered how they are chosen, since it's clearly not simply by # of favorites - I know of several posts from threads I've read lately that have many more favorites than what's there now.
I guess I would be in favor of filtering out some of the snarky comments that get dozens of "I agree" favorites, just because they aren't informative, and at times they reinforce meanness. But otherwise, what's the algorithm? What should the algorithm be? Who should write it?
But I've always wondered how they are chosen, since it's clearly not simply by # of favorites - I know of several posts from threads I've read lately that have many more favorites than what's there now.
I guess I would be in favor of filtering out some of the snarky comments that get dozens of "I agree" favorites, just because they aren't informative, and at times they reinforce meanness. But otherwise, what's the algorithm? What should the algorithm be? Who should write it?
Thank you for pointing out the text at the top of the Popular page, box, that confirms that I did read it correctly.
Yet I posted this entire post to say: my observations are that it does not, in fact, behave that way. Sometimes the list doesn't change for a week. Sometimes posts that have more favorites within the last week, aren't there ever, at all.
I hope you believe that I'm reporting my observations correctly. Can we move forward with that now?
posted by Dashy at 10:28 AM on February 16 [3 favorites]
Yet I posted this entire post to say: my observations are that it does not, in fact, behave that way. Sometimes the list doesn't change for a week. Sometimes posts that have more favorites within the last week, aren't there ever, at all.
I hope you believe that I'm reporting my observations correctly. Can we move forward with that now?
posted by Dashy at 10:28 AM on February 16 [3 favorites]
tracking this. if tomorrow at this time I reload that page, I'd expect all faves from before Feb 09, to not be there.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 2:07 PM on February 16
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 2:07 PM on February 16
Not present in Popular comments right now:
Link 1
Link 2
posted by Dashy at 2:13 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]
Link 1
Link 2
posted by Dashy at 2:13 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]
Ah, both of those are in USPolitics tagged threads, and from this 2018 update:
we're going to filter politics megathread content out of the Popular Favorites view to make it a less grim and monotone listposted by lucidium at 2:46 PM on February 16 [4 favorites]
Aha, i did not know that. That makes some sense. It'll hide some topical deep dives, but i can see how those threads are hard to mix with others.
posted by Dashy at 2:56 PM on February 16
posted by Dashy at 2:56 PM on February 16
I think I knew that at some point and forgot. I enjoy perusing Popular posts; I steal a lot of pithy commentary and repost on social media.
posted by theora55 at 4:54 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]
posted by theora55 at 4:54 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]
For the implementation of this for the New Site, it might make more sense to just limit the number of comments from a single post that can be in the Popular Comments section at the same time. That'll let some of the best rise to the top, while avoiding the whole thing being dominated by a single topic.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 7:24 PM on February 16 [3 favorites]
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 7:24 PM on February 16 [3 favorites]
What I have found, and this is personal observation not statistical fact, is that when a comment makes it to the list, it then becomes sort of a self fulfilling situation. I had one make the list once (even a blind squirrel...) and once it did I suddenly started getting more favorites to that comment such that it was only going to drop off the list based on time not # of favorites.
Pie in the sky, but I would love to make Popular Comments be more like a query to a database. Set the default to what it is today, but allow the user to modify it by date or by tag or by minimum number, etc. Show me all the favorited comments above 50 favorites in the last year with the tag cooking. Something like that.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:13 PM on February 16 [5 favorites]
Pie in the sky, but I would love to make Popular Comments be more like a query to a database. Set the default to what it is today, but allow the user to modify it by date or by tag or by minimum number, etc. Show me all the favorited comments above 50 favorites in the last year with the tag cooking. Something like that.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:13 PM on February 16 [5 favorites]
The way it counts comments is weird, though, unless people are unfavoriting in waves after they favorite a comment. I paid enough attention to know I don’t know how it works, but never tried to sit down and figure it out.
posted by Vatnesine at 8:53 PM on February 17
posted by Vatnesine at 8:53 PM on February 17
It's been weird for years, and I look forward to one of the mods or developers explaining sometime soon in this thread how it works. Thanks for posting this, Dashy.
posted by catspajamas at 8:01 AM on February 18
posted by catspajamas at 8:01 AM on February 18
It is somewhat rickety, too -- the current Comments list is about half politics anyway.
posted by Dashy at 12:39 PM on February 18
posted by Dashy at 12:39 PM on February 18
I thought I could be clever and just grab the logic from the new site's repo but...
if ($popular) {
// TODO: Add logic to get popular posts
}
posted by easy ice at 8:57 PM on February 18 [1 favorite] Whelp. That answers that question!
posted by Dashy at 4:44 AM on February 19 [1 favorite]
posted by Dashy at 4:44 AM on February 19 [1 favorite]
we're going to filter politics megathread content out of the Popular Favorites view to make it a less grim and monotone list
It is somewhat rickety, too -- the current Comments list is about half politics anyway.
The Europe thread doesn't have USPolitics as a flag right now. That post is where most of the political comments I see on the list came from. I can imagine not wanting to tag it as such when it was first posted, but the conversation has focused on US people and actions.
posted by soelo at 11:30 AM on February 19
It is somewhat rickety, too -- the current Comments list is about half politics anyway.
The Europe thread doesn't have USPolitics as a flag right now. That post is where most of the political comments I see on the list came from. I can imagine not wanting to tag it as such when it was first posted, but the conversation has focused on US people and actions.
posted by soelo at 11:30 AM on February 19
Whelp. That answers that question!
Ha. Still, it shouldn't be difficult for one of the site's employees to let users know what the current code for showing "Popular" comments and posts is, or does, or has been, or something like that, given the oddness of how it appears to (not) be working. Hopefully one of the site's employees will get around to at least partially answering your question in the next week or so. Not being snarky, I understand there may be other, higher priorities, but this shouldn't take more than a week or two to answer, should it?
posted by catspajamas at 12:15 PM on February 19
Ha. Still, it shouldn't be difficult for one of the site's employees to let users know what the current code for showing "Popular" comments and posts is, or does, or has been, or something like that, given the oddness of how it appears to (not) be working. Hopefully one of the site's employees will get around to at least partially answering your question in the next week or so. Not being snarky, I understand there may be other, higher priorities, but this shouldn't take more than a week or two to answer, should it?
posted by catspajamas at 12:15 PM on February 19
It's worth keeping in mind that even in the days when MeFi was fully staffed and had a full-time tech person, who had written the function in question, the question of "how does Popular Comments get filtered" existed mostly as fuzzy oral history. I remember talking with pb about tracking that down to put in the US politics exclusion into play so the page wouldn't be -- as it was at the time -- basically wall-to-wall politics posts with zero joy or serendipity in sight. That lead to a bunch of spelunking to figure out how and where exactly that function was implemented (probably, as so many things in vintage MeFi code, as a SQL stored procedure that noone BUT pb would have been able to make sense of), and we got a change in place, and then likely no one looked at it again for years.
It's absolutely possible for someone to go digging to find the function and parse it and get these details, in the sense that it exists in the codebase to be found. But whether it's going to be worth anybody's time to do so feels a lot more questionable, because we already know the basic answer: it does some fuzzy thresholding based on number of favorites, and it tries to ignore comments in posts with a uspolitics tag, and the output is a little unpredictable around the edges. The exact details aren't going to make a real difference in anyone's day to day use of the site.
I'm guessing searching the MetaTalk archives would yield up some closer-to-the-metal details of how the logic works from when it was last touched, maybe even some from me but I don't remember because it's been yeaaaars. If you're curious, I'd recommend tracking that down (probably do a site search restricted to metatalk and using the key words "popular" and "comments" and skimming through above the fold post results for promising hits, likely the first discussions were ca. 2016 and the rise of Trump). Good opportunity to use community effort as a resource here instead of allocating limited staff resources; MeFi is a big old pile of oral history and a lot of these sorts of technical questions have been asked and answered a few times over the years and are there for the finding.
posted by cortex (retired) at 8:06 AM on February 20 [3 favorites]
It's absolutely possible for someone to go digging to find the function and parse it and get these details, in the sense that it exists in the codebase to be found. But whether it's going to be worth anybody's time to do so feels a lot more questionable, because we already know the basic answer: it does some fuzzy thresholding based on number of favorites, and it tries to ignore comments in posts with a uspolitics tag, and the output is a little unpredictable around the edges. The exact details aren't going to make a real difference in anyone's day to day use of the site.
I'm guessing searching the MetaTalk archives would yield up some closer-to-the-metal details of how the logic works from when it was last touched, maybe even some from me but I don't remember because it's been yeaaaars. If you're curious, I'd recommend tracking that down (probably do a site search restricted to metatalk and using the key words "popular" and "comments" and skimming through above the fold post results for promising hits, likely the first discussions were ca. 2016 and the rise of Trump). Good opportunity to use community effort as a resource here instead of allocating limited staff resources; MeFi is a big old pile of oral history and a lot of these sorts of technical questions have been asked and answered a few times over the years and are there for the finding.
posted by cortex (retired) at 8:06 AM on February 20 [3 favorites]
I found this from pb in 2011:
The number of favorites within the timespan, ranked by number. That's all there is to it.posted by lucidium at 11:30 AM on February 20 [1 favorite]
I thought I could be clever and just grab the logic from the new site's repo but...
One of the things I'll be doing as part of developing the new site is writing a business requirements document that will spell things like this out.
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 12:51 PM on February 20
One of the things I'll be doing as part of developing the new site is writing a business requirements document that will spell things like this out.
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 12:51 PM on February 20
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posted by box at 9:18 AM on February 16