I am not sure exactly what you mean, but if you mean the math of its article rankings then it’s important to note that the amount of very early upvotes, the subreddit a post is posted to, the name and preview thumbnail, and the time of day it is posted all have tremendous impact on its ikelihood to hit the front page.
The algorithm combines recency and total upvotes. It also takes subreddit origin into account so that the totally massive subreddits don’t dominate completely.
All the code is open-source if you want to go really deep, but basically upvotes + time penalty.
The math that makes reddit work
I am not sure exactly what you mean, but if you mean the math of its article rankings then it’s important to note that the amount of very early upvotes, the subreddit a post is posted to, the name and preview thumbnail, and the time of day it is posted all have tremendous impact on its ikelihood to hit the front page.
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~jmcauley/pdfs/icwsm13.pdf
THAT is what I mean. What is that algorithm?
The algorithm combines recency and total upvotes. It also takes subreddit origin into account so that the totally massive subreddits don’t dominate completely.
All the code is open-source if you want to go really deep, but basically upvotes + time penalty.