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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topic with muted tag still shows up in Hot, is it expected?
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I think that should be fixed and pulled in to your site next time the Check New Features background job runs. 
Thanks for pointing it out.
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this is great and actually works
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Are there plans to offer Hot as default sorting for categories?
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TLDR
Hot is hot! Not perfect and I have suggestions, but better than Latest on any site creating more recent topics than an average user can check at a glance. I have enabled it by default in our new community (launched from scratch just two weeks ago). I have set Hot as my default here on Meta and I think the Discourse community would benefit from having it as default here too.
In more detail
When to use Hot or Latest
Let’s not think about ourselves, the twenty-something people who have participated here and the likes that would even find this discussion. We are not representative. Let’s think about the critical mass of users that we need to call our community a success.
I think the Latest/Hot math is simple: if the activity of your forum is small enough so that your average daily visitor can glance at the Latest topics, then keep Latest as default. Otherwise, set Hot by default.
If your average user won’t have the time or the willingness to scan all the Latest topics, then whatever they see in the Main page when they land will be just a random sample. For that matter, show them a Hot random sample. The mathematical chance that it will catch their attention is way higher.
But what about new / recent topics
For users who care about new or recent topics in general, the Latest and New buttons are right there. If they care so much, they can set it in their preferences. If they care but only about certain categories or tags, they can follow them and they will see the notifications and the new/recent entries as Suggested topics.
For instance, admins and moderators probably want to stick to Latest to be sure they are not dropping any balls or noticing trouble when it’s too late.
But my topic, which is so important, is buried down there
That topic is surely important, but does everyone have to see it, or mostly the people who can do something about it, i.e. watching the bug queue or the tags related to your topic. Besides, we have established that people don’t have time to follow Latest anyway, so that topic will be missed by most anyway.
But the algorithm needs improvement
Fully agree! And that is an extra reason to place it as default. Otherwise only the Discourse nerds and the random user will even notice Hot and provide feedback about it.
Speaking of me
I have set Hot by default here on Meta because anyway I wasn’t paying attention to the Latest main page at all. Mind you, I’m a Discourse nerd. I just don’t spend my day following recent topics. Chances are high that I will discover more interesting topics beyond the ones I search for or create.
On our website, just two weeks old, we have turned Hot by default to everyone, and I am setting Latest for me via my preferences. I’m an admin there I will check every single post landing, the sooner the better.
I think 80% or more of Discourse Meta users (thousands) would be happier with Hot if they would just know. The other 20% or less are perfectly skilled to decide for themselves and act accordingly in their preferences. Same in my website, and probably in most Discourse websites open in the public and aiming to have thousands of users posting interesting stuff all the time, reacting, etc.
A lot of the criticism here is more related to a communication problem rather than to anything related to the Hot feature. People didn’t know. The Discourse team might have reasons not to send a message to all TL1 users explaining what will happen, why, and how to keep your status quo in your preferences, but regardless, you can do this on your site, deal with the 5% of users who will complain for a couple of weeks, and then move on. Most of the great software features that are integrated in our lives went through something similar when they were deployed for good.
Suggestions
I have read AI’s explanation about the algorithm and of course the human comments from the Discourse team. I don’t know if there have been more recent improvements but anyway, here’s some suggestions.
Compute the trust level of users driving new activity. A reply from a moderator, TL3, TL2… in a new topic should weigh more than a reply from TL0 / TL1. The different weight is already applied in the value of their likes, right?
Indeed. Views from logged in users should count, but also views from anonymous users (not the bots). Forums don’t live in isolation and people link to topics from social media, other forums, etc. I might be a TL0/TL1 here today, but turns out I’m a Arduino or whatever guru, I just posted a feature request and I’m sharing it in the Dicourse-based Arduino forum and with my 1000s of followers on social media. That generates a spike of views, your Discourse knows that because is tracking that data but maybe not even your admins are aware about the influx of visitors right now. That topic is hot today, why not push it to the Hot list.
Keep improving the Follow/Watch UX so plain users are aware of this feature and use it regularly to select what they care about and ignore what they don’t. If you are a daily visitor of a Discourse forum, your Notifications / Suggested topics should more relevant to you than the state of the Main page right now.
Really, relying on Latest alone is so 1998 
and Hot alone won’t save your specific and personal needs either. At least not the “same Hot for everyone” feature we have today. But we need to get this one good to build the “Hot for you only” alternative better.
Sorry, this was very long. Next time I’ll chat over preferred drinks. I am excited about the Hot and, well, put off, by the short and more negative than positive discussion here, for a feature of such a big impact and importance. 
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I was very happy to see the Hot feature highly featured on the Discourse 3.3. blog post. This is what I have learned after 6 weeks of use in our new community, confirmed by my own use of Hot by default here on Meta.
It still is, and I still subscribe everything I said above about Hot vs Latest.
Now the main page on Meta is my landing page, and when I don’t see obvious notifications, sometimes I lazily check the top topics, sometimes I don’t (but still come back to the main page again). Sometimes I won’t look at discussion, but after seeing it sticking up there during days, it finally piques my curiosity and I click.
Maybe this is not needed after all. Users with higher TL tend to have a bigger network of familiar readers more inclined to like and respond compared to someone newer or less of a frequent poster who might make points just as valid or more, but receive less support just because we humans tend to react this way.
I still think this could be a very good improvement. Especially if it’s capable of promoting topics that are hot today because somewhere in the internet external referrals to this post (i.e. a hot discussion on social media) are bringing a bunch of anonymous readers.
It seems that, right now, the algorithm won’t even bring to the main page a topic receiving thousands of views but no like and no reply. I think if such a peak happens, it’s good that the community knows about it, if only to help get those likes and comments (if the post is good) or to scrutinize the post (if it’s controversial).
Anyone else has thoughts to share… especially after using the Hot feature on their site or here for a few weeks?
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Yes, I agree, this is an interesting point. Though, maybe it’s a bit of an administrator/moderator feature? Also, for controversial posts, it would potentially be counter-productive, by bringing it to the forefront, you’d be giving it more attention vs less.
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