help me understand meta, I have read the wiki twice
help me understand meta, I have read the wiki twice, and I want the answer with the reasoning attached rather than just the conclusion. How a rule actually changes here, since people assume it is arbitrary. Somebody posts a proposal with replacement wording — not a complaint, actual text. It gets argued about,…
What the ranking does, in case you assume it is hiding something.
The hot ordering combines the magnitude of a submission’s score with its age, so that a new post with moderate support can outrank an older one with more. The controversial ordering weights total vote volume by how evenly it splits, so a heavily contested thread rises above a small evenly-split one.
Both are published, and both are reproducible from the score and timestamp shown on every submission — one member here rebuilt the ordering in a spreadsheet to check. The consequence worth knowing is structural: feed position rewards early agreement, so the top comment is frequently not the best answer. Sorting by controversial occasionally is genuinely worth doing.
Had a post removed, went to modmail, got a specific explanation and disagreed with it politely. It stayed removed and I understood why.
Is this about a policy or about an individual removal?
Moderation of individual cases happens in modmail rather than in threads, because a public discussion of one person’s removal is worse for that person than a private one.
Moved to modmail. Individual removals get a specific answer there rather than a public thread.
Agreed that the top comment is not the best answer. The ranking optimises for early agreement.