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…)