-Valtren- wrote:

I don't think the community will take the trending page disappearing very well.

Forgot to respond to this one! OK, that might be a problem. As I explained before though, if anyone is willing to go a bit further, there will probably still be external programs for that. But yeah, removing it off the main site may cause some controversy.

Bring Up Their Post

WONGMY wrote:

-Rodri wrote:

While I do believe some of the Scratch community is toxic, I don't think removing “Trending” is the solution.

Could you explain why? I'd like to hear.

They're always going to be toxic and rude people, we can only try to counteract it small plug. Removing “toxicity” is just not possible. Removing “Trending” would also make lots of non-haters sad about it disappearing, it is a big feature of Scratch's Website. It's half of the home page and also the whole explore section!

For everyone's knowledge, trending isn't the only part of the explore page. Popular and Recent are also there, but both have problems:

• Most of the projects on popular are months old and have accumulated a million views or more, so often the projects shown there will stay there for a while. Also, only a few people have the following to amass that many views, so most Scratchers have a near-zero chance of ever reaching popular.
  
• Although literally anyone can get onto “Recent”, so many projects get uploaded every day that with just one refresh your project could be gone for good from the page. Also, a lot of the projects don't meet the high expectations of many Scratchers, so most people would just gloss over 99% of the projects there.
  

Trending is the easiest way to find good projects, since new projects are there every day. As others have stated, removing it wouldn't get rid of the problems, and would likely cause a lot of outcry.

-Rodri wrote:

(snip)
They're always going to be toxic and rude people, we can only try to counteract it small plug. Removing “toxicity” is just not possible. Removing “Trending” would also make lots of non-haters sad about it disappearing, it is a big feature of Scratch's Website. It's half of the home page and also the whole explore section!

OK. Here's my reasoning.

The trending section takes projects that have been getting a short burst of attention. However, because they're now on the front page, they'll get even more of a short burst of attention. Climbing up the trending is a good concept, but there's one more thing. Scratch doesn't have any sort of dislike system, and “The projects are sorted via how many loves and favorites they have, in proportion to the amount of time they have been shared.” (SW Source). I'm not saying they should add one. If they ever do, it should be invisible to all users including the project creator. But back on topic, the problem that this causes is that it's based solely on loves/favourites, which means that if the reception is extremely mixed, it will still easily get on there even though that might not be representative of what the community actually thinks (e.g. if half the entire community love/favourited it, but the other half absolutely despised it, it would be at #1 on trending even though it should theoretically be much lower). Stolen/generic projects usually fall into this, because part of the community is usually oblivious to (or don't mind) the “bad ethics” and other dramatic discussions surrounding them. But the people who can't have their voice heard by a simple button will go to the one place that they can be: the comments. This, in combination with climbing trending, would bring a lot more attention, both positive and negative, to stolen/generic projects, and cause a lot more drama. In something like BodyBuilder's case, people on the “bad” camp might repeatedly see a creator get on trending through this, and be frustrated enough to start hating on that creator (not just on random generic projects). There's (perhaps, the only way to see if it works is in practice) a really simple solution too all of this. Instead of being solely based off of loves/favourites to time, add another variable. How many unique users view it compared to how many loves/favourites it gets, over time. This way, a dislike system doesn't have to be introduced, so small project creators don't get discouraged, and viewers on larger projects get a say by NOT hearting it. Now, I know what you're thinking, what if a project's just shared and the first person to view it hearts it? Well, of course, take everything I say with a grain of salt. It doesn't have to work in exactly the way I described, perhaps that should be FACTORED IN to the current algorithm.

Well that might be another way to solve the problem, the more people reply and give me their take on the subject the more I realise that perhaps there are other ways to solve it (haha). But I think my original solution was also aimed at more evenly distributing popularity over the site, because as I was half-joking in an earlier post, the system makes the rich richer with the trending climbing and so it incentivises to make lazy content farms instead of learning how to create things you're genuinely proud of. So yeah, by removing trending I was trying to put less of a focus on massively loved games and support smaller creators instead. But perhaps a good compromise is to just move the trending page to a less-than-front-page position. Making it a slightly more obscure subpage will make projects on it gain less attention from people not specifically looking for good projects to try out, both positive and negative. I'll update the clarifications section and title of the topic post. Your suggestion is also really good.

But IDK, maybe my opinions on this are too radical to consider for everybody.

I do not want it to be completely removed, but I’m fully on board with having it moved to a more hidden page, as it almost completely shuts down all that is wrong with the Trending page. Since it wouldn’t be such a direct spot, users wouldn’t try so hard to get on it, and good projects would be on Trending.

WONGMY wrote:

But back on topic, the problem that this causes is that it's based solely on loves/favourites, which means that if the reception is extremely mixed, it will still easily get on there even though that might not be representative of what the community actually thinks (e.g. if half the entire community love/favourited it, but the other half absolutely despised it, it would be at #1 on trending even though it should theoretically be much lower).

This is a pretty good point. Now, keep in mind that nobody really knows how the Trending algorithm works. Technically we don't even know if it really does run based off of loves and favorites (although it's reasonable to suspect that it does). But perhaps views should contribute to some part of it — maybe the project should have a high love/view ratio? Depending on how views work (which I don't remember), it's possible to be able to exploit this to prevent certain projects from being on Trending.

Oops I just read the rest of what you wrote and this is basically what you suggested. It's a good solution that doesn't involve removing Trending entirely, at least.

WONGMY wrote:

But I think my original solution was also aimed at more evenly distributing popularity over the site, because as I was half-joking in an earlier post, the system makes the rich richer with the trending climbing and so it incentivises to make lazy content farms instead of learning how to create things you're genuinely proud of.

I'm not sure what could be done to fix this. It seems natural that those who have more followers, for example, will continue to get more followers, while those with less will not gain so many.

WONGMY wrote:

So yeah, by removing trending I was trying to put less of a focus on massively loved games and support smaller creators instead. But perhaps a good compromise is to just move the trending page to a less-than-front-page position. Making it a slightly more obscure subpage will make projects on it gain less attention from people not specifically looking for good projects to try out, both positive and negative. I'll update the clarifications section and title of the topic post. Your suggestion is also really good.

If the page were simply moved, wouldn't everybody just learn where the page is and start chasing after that Explore page?

Za-Chary wrote:

If the page were simply moved, wouldn't everybody just learn where the page is and start chasing after that Explore page?

Yeah, I guess so. But the point that I was trying to make was that the more casual users of Scratch (which seems to be over half from the statistics) would be less likely to stumble upon the page. And so as cactus-cacti said in the post above yours,

cactus_cacti wrote:

Since it wouldn’t be such a direct spot, users wouldn’t try so hard to get on it, and good projects would be on Trending.

So would it stay in the same dropdown menu as popular and recent are but is not the default?

I didn't read everyone's posts but I do support, especially the part about getting rid of top loved/top remixed etc. and replacing them with something else. The projects there aren't actually that good. /srs

WONGMY wrote:

Also by “trending section” I'm not really referring to the trending mode when searching, just the main explore page and the few front page rows at the bottom.

Oh, okay. Also, just to make it clear, it's not a mode, well, since I last checked. It's like a category to sort out projects in a dropdown menu.

the_awsome_penguinja wrote:

So would it stay in the same dropdown menu as popular and recent are but is not the default?

This post isn't referring to the search mode

PaperMarioFan2022 wrote:

WONGMY wrote:

Also by “trending section” I'm not really referring to the trending mode when searching, just the main explore page and the few front page rows at the bottom.

Oh, okay. Also, just to make it clear, it's not a mode, well, since I last checked. It's like a category to sort out projects in a dropdown menu.

I'm pretty sure I've seen it referred to as a “mode” before, but I'm not too sure. But I think we both get what each other mean

WONGMY wrote:

(#32)

the_awsome_penguinja wrote:

So would it stay in the same dropdown menu as popular and recent are but is not the default?

This post isn't referring to the search mode

Read the first post again. WONGMY literally says that it doesn't refer to searching but to other things like the bottom of the front page etc.

Bump

wait what about the report button?
Support though

Maybe instead of removing trending, the ST could remove the ability to see how many likes or favorites a project has, or even make a “suggested projects for you” page, if that's possible. Though it is good to see what other people like, some Scratchers are making it more important than creativity or originality.

--Vermillion-- wrote:

Maybe instead of removing trending, the ST could remove the ability to see how many likes or favorites a project has, or even make a “suggested projects for you” page, if that's possible. Though it is good to see what other people like, some Scratchers are making it more important than creativity or originality.

best reply. I really hope there is a suggestion for it

buyp

WONGMY wrote:

-Valtren- wrote:

I don't think the community will take the trending page disappearing very well.

Forgot to respond to this one! OK, that might be a problem. As I explained before though, if anyone is willing to go a bit further, there will probably still be external programs for that. But yeah, removing it off the main site may cause some controversy.

“some”
For a community who literally tried to riot just because the color changed, I doub't the “some controversy” would end very nicely