Where are the **real** rants??

(Also, pic jokes are where it's at! 😜)

Yeah, I threw a picture "rant" up to check the response.

My guess is that we're flooded with people that don't have the patience to read rants, and it's become a competition / challenge on getting as many pluses as possible. Not to mention free stuff..

Another may be that many of the rants are not really rants. I see more os war, js framework talk than proper rants. It kills the interest having to scroll through "spam".

I'm probably too old, but even though everyone is very welcome here, I just don't associate with many of the rants written by 14 years olds.

Yeah, I'm probably just old liking a good story rather than memes..

@viking8 I agree. I wanted to spread the word of using "rant" tag when it's an actual rant but the search also finds "!rant" and "not a rant" tags when you search it. So maybe something like "actual_rant" can work, what do you say? Spread the word?

@Letmecode now that's a real rant! ;-)

@solocoder @viking8 @dfox devRant probably needs an AI algorithm to figure out the real rants and ability to filter to see only them. Or maybe users can upvote real rants with "rant" button to up the rantyness count? But, filter is definitely needed.

@youprat totally depends on what @dfox and @trogus want for this app. Of there is a commercial plan, then larger memberbase is worth more than a few oldfart Puritans ;)

Menu -> Stories should get you 80% of the way there if that's what you're looking for.

Also, I'm not looking to call people out, but @viking8's last "rant" is a frequently re-posted image. Nothing wrong with that, it happens, but I'm just showing that this issue isn't black and white.

And on the other side, pretty much every user enjoys image posts in some form of another.

What I'd personally like to see is users who have a problem with content cite specific examples if they are going to complain. It's extremely hard to understand what people are complaining about when I go to their profile and see a bunch of images (many reposts) that they recently ++'d. That just tells me we're doing the right thing now with our repost functionality.

@dfox these are curated? How does one get into such a list?

@youprat nope, just by length.

@dfox check my first comment on this rant ;)

@dfox Love the stories tab! Dint know that page existed!

@viking8 so you meant for it to be a re-post? My point is we have no intention or desire to completely eliminate re-posts because the simple fact is many enjoy them and generally only a small percentage of users see specific ones. Plus we already penalize images in our algorithm.

Our system is very democratic and I think we offer a good selection of ways to view rants, like stories, that appeal to a wide variety of tastes.

@youprat glad you like! We will be making more prominent soon.

@dfox as you say, reposts are not really a problem, and sorted with the downvote. I posted the image to see how quick the response is compared to "normal" rants, and I see why people love getting such enormous responses, that memes take over.

As I said earlier, I'm just an old fart complaining about the young ones today. Every once in a while, a read a gem - like your garlic boy, that keeps me scrolling for more ;)

@viking8 thanks, and lol I don't think you're an old fart :) We like hearing feedback about this stuff, and also hearing what people consider to be solutions.

And this isn't directed at you - but everyone who gives this kind of feedback - comments like "stories are along the right lines, but I don't use because xyz" are very helpful for us to develop better features.

@dfox, firstly i love stories. Such a seemingly simple feature, yet it's awesome. I know you've got a large backlog, but... have you already discussed a possibility of allowing full (or at least more) user configuration of the sorting algorithm? What I mean by this would basically be a list of toggle or variable options that tweak sort. So things like "penalizing pictures" could be toggled by each end user to customize the app to their preference, thereby allowing each user to have even more of a customized experience.

@brettmoan I don't know how @dfox stores the rants but what you suggest doesn't scale. You cannot sort the entire database for each user nor can you create an index for everyone. You can only create a finite amount of indexed sort algorithms and let the user choose between them.

@solocoder you don't sort the entire database, and that's not at all what I'm suggesting. As far as it "not scaling", wtf are you thinking is so costly it can't scale? What massive performance fail are you envisioning that comptenent coders a d and sufficient hardware cannot solve? The app and it's various sorts already includes various sorts and individualized queries to the database. For sorting We can currently choose between algo, number ++s(in date ranges), and timestamp. However we know that in "the magic" that is algo sort, there is a preference given for rants the uset hasnt seen already (decreasing reseeing a post twice when youve already seen it recently) and there is also a weight given to pictures to make them appear less frequently. In other sections of the app There's also an individual query being done when you view a user's list of rants/comments. You also get an individual query hitting the database when you use the search.

@solocoder the sorting algorithm for algo already takes several variables into account, however they are not configurable parameters.

@brettmoan again, I don't know how its actually implemented here but usually "Algo sort" gives each rant a precalculated "rank" and indexes by it. You don't want to add a custom rank per user and you don't want to sort millions of rants per user (it will take time!). So I don't understand how you propose to give each user his own order. If you can tell me a performant way of doing so it would help me in many projects of mine.

@brettmoan notice my last line of my previous comment, you can easily create several indexes and let the user choose between them but you cannot have indeterminate amount of indexes + creating an index takes time, ram and slows insertion time.

@solocoder hmm, okay I was presumptive last night and overlooked that you were referring to literal database index objects.

If your comparing the sorting on non indexed columns to indexed columns you're correct the former will never preform as well as the latter.

I think it's possible to do a bit of this customization, but probably not all of it without some relatively large data changes. The part I feel would be difficult to optimize would be the sorting of posts made by "followed" users. Since this would be different per user, you would have to join to whatever relation is storing this information. Whether this join is in the main query, or part of a subselect, the problem then becomes that you're now ordering either by columns from multiple tables , or a derived field. This could never preform as well as a sort by a single indexed column.