Fresh Hot Stuff

That title isn’t meant to be vague. It refers to the Hot Posts and Hot Blogs lists on the front page. I think we’re not alone in getting a little tired of seeing the same items showing up for hours or days at a time. It was time to shake things up. The rankings are still in order but now they vary with every page load.

We’re now showing a random, top-heavy sample of the top posts and blogs. That is, we display more items from rankings 1-10 than 11-20 and so on. Rank 1 is always shown in the top spot. The next spot is a random selection from ranks 2-3. The next one is from 4-6, then 7-10. Thus even the 50th most popular post can be on the home page about one tenth of the time.

The odds that the page will show the same 10-item list are something like 3,628,800:1 against. The probability distribution is shown here:

 item | odds | ranks
    1 |  1:1 |     1
    2 |  2:1 |   2-3
    3 |  3:1 |   4-6
    4 |  4:1 |  7-10
    5 |  5:1 | 11-15
    6 |  6:1 | 16-21
    7 |  7:1 | 22-28
    8 |  8:1 | 29-36
    9 |  9:1 | 37-45
   10 | 10:1 | 46-55
   11 | 11:1 | 56-66
   12 | 12:1 | 67-78
   13 | 13:1 | 79-91

I could get even more technical, explaining how we make the lists when there are not enough ranked items, but the odds that you’ll be interested are 14,285:1 against.

I hope this makes the front page more interesting for regular visitors. The complete rankings are still available at BOTD, updated hourly and archived nightly.

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