Agreed, I was mostly joking, but there are still algorithms that drive the hot and controversial sorting. The fact that you can look up how those algorithms work is also a major difference.
And usually by “algorithm” people mean a feed that is curated to you specifically based off all the data they’ve vacuumed up. Hot/controversial have a clear set of rules about upvote/downvotes over time and they apply exactly the same to everyone, so everyone sorting by hot for instance on a thread or community is seeing the exact same thing
Agreed, I was mostly joking, but there are still algorithms that drive the hot and controversial sorting. The fact that you can look up how those algorithms work is also a major difference.
And usually by “algorithm” people mean a feed that is curated to you specifically based off all the data they’ve vacuumed up. Hot/controversial have a clear set of rules about upvote/downvotes over time and they apply exactly the same to everyone, so everyone sorting by hot for instance on a thread or community is seeing the exact same thing