Reddit's empire is founded on a flawed algorithm - Ian's Tech Notes

Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm - Ian's Tech Notes

Posted on December 9, 2013 Reddit has a bug in their code. This bug is currently present in their production platform, and has been for years. It affects one of the most important algorithms in the entire site, the “Hot” ranking algorithm for link popularity. It has real, demonstrable negative effects. It has been reported to Reddit’s technical team several times and never fixed. The Bug Reddit needs to determine which articles are “hot” right now. Newer material is better than older material. Material with many positive votes is better than material with few votes, and both are better than material with mostly negative votes. This is pretty straightforward to calculate. One determines numeric values representing these two measures, and multiplies by some constants to determine exactly how much priority each measure gets 1 . The devil is in the details, or in this case, the implementation . seconds = date - 1134028003 seconds , is based on a UNIX timestamp. It’s a bright way to do it:

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