I still get a bit confused by the names we use for our news feed.
Sorting
Trends have direction. Other measures just have magnitude. If we’re talking about clicks then…
- What’s popular = click “distance” = total number of clicks
- What’s hot = click speed = number of clicks per minute
- What’s trending = click acceleration = number of clicks per minute per minute
Each measure is the differential (gradient) of the measure above it. Distance can only go up. Speed can go up or down but never be negative. Acceleration can be positive or negative.
I vote for the naming convention: views, views_speed, views_accel. (Underscores, hyphens, camel case whatever).
What’s being sorted
We currently support sorting by trending, popular, social, shares, date and score. Is “trending” for views, or shares or both? Is “social” popular or trending?
I think we need to be more specific
- Most popular = popular by views and shares
- Most shared = popular by shares
- Most viewed = popular by views
- Hot = hot by views and shares
- Hot on social = hot by shares
- Hot by views = hot by views
- News feed = score. (I think this incorporates freshness and various boosts/exclusions)
- Latest = date, latest first
Absolute vs relative
In my previous post i described how trending algorithms could be made self-optimising by using “normalised” click speed. This is relative while un-normalised click speed is absolute.
I vote for using the suffix “_norm” to indicate normalised fields e.g. views_speed_norm