I like Hot but I don’t like it as the default on meta. For a few days I just thought there was a drop in activity. Now that I understand what happened, I find I just end up switching to Lastest whenever I visit
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You can change your default in user prefs
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A couple of weeks later @lindsey / @awesomerobot / @chapoi here are my thoughts:
- Hot remains awesome as a default for first visit after you have not been around for 24 hours+
- As you work through your session it becomes less useful and more annoying, cause that thing at the top, it just never goes away.
- Hot is better than top in that is surfaces more discussions and is 100% automatic
So where do I think we should take this?
I think more experiments needed.
Specifically as @awesomerobot raised in the past there is a real need for “Hot+Unseen”. Hot+Unseen solves the #1 issue with hot (though it creates other issues of “where did that thing vanish”)
Where I am on the fence here … is “hot+unseen” a new filter? Is it a user option on hot? How do we even run this experiment?
A BIG piece here for member experience is that our “home page per user” is just so restricting. It has to be top/hot/new/unread… it can not be any other URL. Perhaps we should allow “home page” … “other…” then you can select whatever filter you want (grouping of tags / grouping of categories / custom filters … etc…)
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There’s a series of questions that I’d like us to be able to answer:
- Is Hot valuable as its designed today as a homepage on Meta?
- It Hot valuable as its designed today as a homepage for any types of communities?
- Is Hot valuable as its designed today in general?
We can answer these questions by:
- Talking to users on Meta about their experience with Hot as the default homepage on Meta.
- Polling admins about their use of Hot in their communities, as a homepage and as a general sorting option.
- Get connected with community members to learn more about their experiences with Hot and their workflows in general so we can get more information about what members want / need out of these homepage options.
The outcomes to these questions could point us in a few different directions:
- Hot doesn’t work as Meta’s homepage, but other types of communities like Hot and like it as a default homepage. Maybe we are just content and leave it at that.
- Hot doesn’t work as a default homepage anywhere, but folks like it as one of their available homepage sorting option for certain use cases (e.g., catching up after long absences from the community). Maybe we leave it at that, maybe we decide to figure out how to make it more useful as a homepage.
- Hot doesn’t work as a default homepage or as an available homepage sorting option anywhere. Okay, we need to make some significant changes and run further experiments to see how we can fix that.
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I’m in the camp of users that don’t go through the full list of items in /hot every day. I’m liking it a lot here on meta and I think it is a much better daily driver than /latest and /top. Its somewhat static nature during the day is a feature to me, I like that it shows me what I’ve read and what I haven’t read from today’s 
debates and if at the end of the day it’s mostly a list of topics I’ve seen, good… it’s a signal that no new, hot topics bubbled up during the day.
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Good job 
It could be better if the site setting desktop category page style can choose ‘Categories and Hot Topics’ 
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I don’t understand the people who don’t understand that “You can change your default in YOUR user preferences any time you want”.
Did you read for what that was an answer? It wasn’t because an user could change his/hers settings. It was matter of user’s setting was changed when default changed, and no one told that.
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Ohk!! That I didn’t understand 
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Using it for a while here on meta, I’m not yet convinced that it’s a meaningful improvement. In fact, before reading this thread, I wondered if sorting is occasionally broken for Latest.
Maybe that’s because I typically visit at least a couple of times per week and the advantages don’t really surface with such a visiting pattern, but I feel the feature still needs a bit of improvement before it makes sense to have it as a default.
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I think Hot is useful when:
- coming back to a forum after having not visited for a while (more than a week)
- checking what are the interesting topics in your first visit to the forum within a day (if there are more than ~20 new topics posted each day)
So I would like to be shown Hot by default if:
- I haven’t visited the forum for a while
- it is my first visit to the forum today, and there are more than ~20 topics that have been posted
But I would like to somehow easily switch my homepage to be Latest after, once I have finished browsing the topics on Hot.
So if there’s an option to dismiss Hot somehow, then subsequently whenever i visit the home page, it will be my default of Latest.
I mean, i guess i could also set my homepage preference to Latest and then jump to the Hot tab too. But i did like having Hot as default shown to me first.
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I love the suggestion, but communicating it is so tricky!
It is one of those cases where implementing is way easier than adding the options 
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