# Comment count heuristic removed from feed algo

Source: https://telegra.ph/Comment-count-heuristic-removed-from-feed-algo-01-27
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Comment-count-heuristic-removed-from-feed-algo?index=0x65b56991b509de8bf417dc552904462280b69a8902a125294eb1260516e5a75577bbbc7b
Submitted by tim on 2024-01-27 UTC, 1 upvote, 0 comments

## Summary

The site's team removed a feed ranking rule that had boosted stories with more comments, after it produced a weird ranking and degraded feed quality. Tim Daubenschütz wrote that the rule, introduced the previous day, counted each comment as half an upvote, but it did not decay older comments the way upvotes decayed, so comments kept their weight over time. The post says comments are expected to influence rankings again in the future, and that product updates will now be posted on the site rather than in the Telegram channel.

## Article

Comment count heuristic removed from feed algo

Tim Daubenschütz

Yesterday, we started rating stories higher in the main feed if they had more comments. A comment essentially counted for half an upvote in the rating formula. Here's the commit.

However, I didn't do that implementation properly; for example, I didn't factor in decaying the noteworthiness of comments that had occurred long ago. And so, while upvotes decayed in relevancy over time, comments didn't.

Today, this led to a weird ranking in the feed and degraded its quality. So, I just removed it.

However, we want comments to influence a story's ranking in the future! Stay tuned.

PS: I now plan to make product updates on the site directly and not in the Telegram channel anymore. We now have comments, so the discussion should move into the product.