#Randall Munroe - a statistical estimation ordering When reddit had a similar problem with new comments getting lost at the bottom, Randall Munroe brought in a new sorting algorithm. Obviously don't just vote for this because you like Randall Munroe - it's an interesting algorithm well worth reading about before you decide.

It only requires the information that stack exchange already uses to sort by votes anyway (upvotes and downvotes), but deals elegantly with precisely the problem we're discussing. The example at the end demonstrates this nicely.

The algorithm has the best features of sorting by votes, sorting randomly, and sorting by time, without actually using any randomness or time, just upvotes and downvotes.

In short: The Randall Munroe algorithm works well on reddit because it uses both upvotes and downvotes to measure how statistically likely a post is to get to the top, and orders by the expected future position rather than just its current votes. So it doesn't need time because the downvotes give a percentage measure rather than just a plain count of upvotes The problem with applying that to stack exchange is that downvotes are a rare thing here - most answers have zero downvotes, so we might need to take a different approach that bases the statistical measure on upvotes, downvotes, and time. These are all already available to the sorting code of stack exchange so it is feasible to implement.

Randall Munroe - a statistical estimation ordering

When reddit had a similar problem with new comments getting lost at the bottom, Randall Munroe brought in a new sorting algorithm. Obviously don't just vote for this because you like Randall Munroe - it's an interesting algorithm well worth reading about before you decide.

It only requires the information that stack exchange already uses to sort by votes anyway (upvotes and downvotes), but deals elegantly with precisely the problem we're discussing. The example at the end demonstrates this nicely.

The algorithm has the best features of sorting by votes, sorting randomly, and sorting by time, without actually using any randomness or time, just upvotes and downvotes.

In short: The Randall Munroe algorithm works well on reddit because it uses both upvotes and downvotes to measure how statistically likely a post is to get to the top, and orders by the expected future position rather than just its current votes. So it doesn't need time because the downvotes give a percentage measure rather than just a plain count of upvotes The problem with applying that to stack exchange is that downvotes are a rare thing here - most answers have zero downvotes, so we might need to take a different approach that bases the statistical measure on upvotes, downvotes, and time. These are all already available to the sorting code of stack exchange so it is feasible to implement.

#Randall Munroe When reddit had a similar problem with new comments getting lost at the bottom, Randall Munroe brought in a new sorting algorithm. Obviously don't just vote for this because you like Randall Munroe - it's an interesting algorithm well worth reading about before you decide.

It only requires the information that stack exchange already uses to sort by votes anyway (upvotes and downvotes), but deals elegantly with precisely the problem we're discussing. The example at the end demonstrates this nicely.

#Randall Munroe - a statistical estimation ordering When reddit had a similar problem with new comments getting lost at the bottom, Randall Munroe brought in a new sorting algorithm. Obviously don't just vote for this because you like Randall Munroe - it's an interesting algorithm well worth reading about before you decide.

It only requires the information that stack exchange already uses to sort by votes anyway (upvotes and downvotes), but deals elegantly with precisely the problem we're discussing. The example at the end demonstrates this nicely.

The algorithm has the best features of sorting by votes, sorting randomly, and sorting by time, without actually using any randomness or time, just upvotes and downvotes.

In short: The Randall Munroe algorithm works well on reddit because it uses both upvotes and downvotes to measure how statistically likely a post is to get to the top, and orders by the expected future position rather than just its current votes. So it doesn't need time because the downvotes give a percentage measure rather than just a plain count of upvotes The problem with applying that to stack exchange is that downvotes are a rare thing here - most answers have zero downvotes, so we might need to take a different approach that bases the statistical measure on upvotes, downvotes, and time. These are all already available to the sorting code of stack exchange so it is feasible to implement.