This thread has a lot of momentum so I'm keeping a summary here for the ST to see the relevant points at a glance.

Trending results are biased and this seems to be against either number of followers or projects gaining > 100 loves in 1st day. The following is a very clear example of this:

Festive Piano Guy by RokCoder-TestAccount (212 followers)
186 views, 34 loves, 25 faves in 2 days : 5th page of trending (#music)

Piano Guy by RokCoder (7088 followers)
1110 views, 312 loves, 239 faves in 4 days : Nowhere to be found in trending (#music)

More to follow when I have time to go through the entire thread…


Original post below

I've recently released two projects that have done reasonably well yet neither of them appear in the trending pages at all (and I've looked back through many, many pages out of curiosity). This is fine but what makes me wonder about the trending algorithm is when searching for the project by name and then sorting it by trending, my own projects are featured well below the remixes. Slightly disappointing to say the least :D

This is the link to the sorted search - https://scratch.mit.edu/search/projects?mode=trending&q=uno%20deluxe

The project is getting maybe 150 likes per day so I would have expected the algorithm to at least be putting it above the remixes

Does anyone have any insight into this? Maybe a member of the ST?

—–

My browser / operating system: MacOS Macintosh X 11.0.0, Chrome 86.0.4240.198, No Flash version detected

Yeah, I have no idea how Trending works. You've seen my recent game, “Topological Space,” correct? That was Top Loved and Top Remixed (it kinda jumped back and forth between the two sections) — but throughout that time, it was nowhere to be found on Trending. I could only suspect that the Trending algorithm was changed recently (I don't know that for sure). If so, did it change for better or for worse? I suppose that would be up for debate.

At this point I have the mindset of “As wonderful as Trending can be sometimes, we should just not worry about it.” There has been quite a lot of drama and disrespect that was caused by certain projects getting on Trending and certain projects not getting on Trending… at least for my sake, it's best to stay away from it.

Za-Chary wrote:

Yeah, I have no idea how Trending works. You've seen my recent game, “Topological Space,” correct? That was Top Loved and Top Remixed (it kinda jumped back and forth between the two sections) — but throughout that time, it was nowhere to be found on Trending. I could only suspect that the Trending algorithm was changed recently (I don't know that for sure). If so, did it change for better or for worse? I suppose that would be up for debate.

At this point I have the mindset of “As wonderful as Trending can be sometimes, we should just not worry about it.” There has been quite a lot of drama and disrespect that was caused by certain projects getting on Trending and certain projects not getting on Trending… at least for my sake, it's best to stay away from it.

It’s interesting because if you search for “Topological Space”, your project is 7th on the “popular” list behind a load of remixes.

If you search for “za-chary”, the topological space project doesn’t appear at all.

So maybe it’s not just trending that’s broken, it’s search too.

yeah, there's all sorts of bugs with the (as far as I can tell) complex algorithms. IDK what it is, but it's probably something with keywords, tags, reshares, and who knows what. all sorts of stuff that can confuse explore. I use the front page instead,,,

Za-Chary wrote:

Yeah, I have no idea how Trending works. You've seen my recent game, “Topological Space,” correct? That was Top Loved and Top Remixed (it kinda jumped back and forth between the two sections) — but throughout that time, it was nowhere to be found on Trending. I could only suspect that the Trending algorithm was changed recently (I don't know that for sure). If so, did it change for better or for worse? I suppose that would be up for debate.

At this point I have the mindset of “As wonderful as Trending can be sometimes, we should just not worry about it.” There has been quite a lot of drama and disrespect that was caused by certain projects getting on Trending and certain projects not getting on Trending… at least for my sake, it's best to stay away from it.

There's another Uno game released at the same time with far less views and loves (no disrespect intended as it's a very nice game) at the top of the #games trending. Mine hasn't touched trending, loved or remixed. If the algorithms are bugged then it's not fair on the people it affects. If it's biased away from people with lots of followers (for example) then I can understand that. It would be really nice to see how this all works though.

colinmacc wrote:

It’s interesting because if you search for “Topological Space”, your project is 7th on the “popular” list behind a load of remixes.

If you search for “za-chary”, the topological space project doesn’t appear at all.

So maybe it’s not just trending that’s broken, it’s search too.

Or, as za-chary's project didn't touch the trending pages either, maybe it's all linked together. I've no idea where to post bug tickets for “trending algorithm showing selective hate”

Another example.

If you search “ai obstacle navigation demo”, @griffpatch_tutor's project is the FIFTEENTH result, behind a load of remixes

colinmacc wrote:

Another example.

If you search “ai obstacle navigation demo”, @griffpatch_tutor's project is the FIFTEENTH result, behind a load of remixes

If that one's not trending or most loved tomorrow then I think it's safe to assume that the results are being skewed by the number of followers

RokCoder wrote:

colinmacc wrote:

Another example.

If you search “ai obstacle navigation demo”, @griffpatch_tutor's project is the FIFTEENTH result, behind a load of remixes

If that one's not trending or most loved tomorrow then I think it's safe to assume that the results are being skewed by the number of followers

STRANGE.

RokCoder wrote:

colinmacc wrote:

Another example.

If you search “ai obstacle navigation demo”, @griffpatch_tutor's project is the FIFTEENTH result, behind a load of remixes

If that one's not trending or most loved tomorrow then I think it's safe to assume that the results are being skewed by the number of followers

Well it's not…..

But, as we already know, your project is OK now, after you unshared to fix a couple of bugs, and reshared it.

So maybe it would be interesting to see if that would work on some of the other projects that are showing the same symptoms?

colinmacc wrote:

Well it's not…..

But, as we already know, your project is OK now, after you unshared to fix a couple of bugs, and reshared it.

So maybe it would be interesting to see if that would work on some of the other projects that are showing the same symptoms?

I think the system needs an overhaul. It's inconsistent to say the very least.

Hmm, that's odd, your Uno project is fifth on Trending for me. I know that Trending is different depending on your language, but it might also be affected by location. Plus, you might not be able to see your own projects on Trending anymore.

Honestly remixes shouldnt be on the same algorithm as main projects.

colinmacc wrote:

Another example.

If you search “ai obstacle navigation demo”, @griffpatch_tutor's project is the FIFTEENTH result, behind a load of remixes

Something is definitely broken, the top project has 10 views.

Oh, I'm bumping this because I'm really curious about how trending is calculated. Whatever the system, there are bugs/issues in it for sure!

I also want to point out that I'm using one of my own projects as the example for the sole reason that it's a reasonable example. This post isn't meant to be specifically about that project,.

Going back to my original Uno Deluxe project, it got hundreds of likes very quickly and, over the next three or four days, was nowhere to be found in trending. I had to un-share it to fix some critical bugs and then, a day after re-sharing, it moved into trending. Sometimes a project needs un-sharing temporarily - if re-sharing bumps it into trending then that issue needs fixing at source rather than people being fearful of re-sharing projects in case there's a backlash of people accusing them of playing the system. Also, it's odd that it wasn't trending before as there were many projects with far less loves gained over a far longer period that were in the first few pages while this project wasn't in the first 20+ pages (if at all).

Because it was popular I made a couple of extra lobbies in my test account. Lobby two quickly amassed a lot of views and loves. It didn't appear anywhere in the trending pages and nor did I expect it to. Lobby three, however, got a fraction of the amount of loves and views and suddenly appeared in the first page of trending.

Is there a random element to this? Is it weighted towards profiles with less followers? Is the re-share issue still the issue that it seems to be? Is the entire thing based on the results of a magic eight ball?

It would be great if some light could be shed on this by the Scratch Team. Whatever the answers to the above questions I think this post does show that there are issues in the system and that it really isn't working in a reliable and consistent way.

I find this really weird too. I'm currently making a project right now and it has around 450 views and 25 likes/favorites. Now, when I search it up and then sort by tending, a remix with 20 views and 3 likes/favorites is above mine, which makes no sense really.

Trending is just a broken mess honestly- games that should be on trending aren't, nobody even knows how it works, reshared projects literally take up half of the explore tab, some projects stay up there for literal weeks without much traction, tag spam (which I'm pretty sure is unfair), and projects that just steal other people's assets anyways.

I want to say “just completely redo how trending works to fix everything” but that seems a bit too much to ask for…

MeIzAwezomeDede wrote:

I find this really weird too. I'm currently making a project right now and it has around 450 views and 25 likes/favorites. Now, when I search it up and then sort by tending, a remix with 20 views and 3 likes/favorites is above mine, which makes no sense really.

Trending is just a broken mess honestly- games that should be on trending aren't, nobody even knows how it works, reshared projects literally take up half of the explore tab, some projects stay up there for literal weeks without much traction, tag spam (which I'm pretty sure is unfair), and projects that just steal other people's assets anyways.

I want to say “just completely redo how trending works to fix everything” but that seems a bit too much to ask for…

Well it used to work pretty reliably and then people started exploiting “the reshare bug”, and maybe the Scratch Team tried to fix that but unfortunately it's a complete mess now.

I've seen other projects with the symptoms you're describing, where remixes with 1 or 2 view get placed higher on trending than the original project, and where if you search by your username, your own project is nowhere to be found (but it's not NFE because it can be searched by project name)

I really think the Scratch team needs to look into this problem urgently!

RokCoder wrote:

snip

I believe one of the contributing factors to this would be that you might have too many followers? I saw a few people that have a large amount of followers say they won't be getting on trending anymore since they have that large amount of followers. I'm not sure if that was what you were speaking about.

-moonchild wrote:

RokCoder wrote:

snip

I believe one of the contributing factors to this would be that you might have too many followers? I saw a few people that have a large amount of followers say they won't be getting on trending anymore since they have that large amount of followers. I'm not sure if that was what you were speaking about.

I don't know if that's why, there's plenty of famous people on trending right now

Trending is broken

MeIzAwezomeDede wrote:

-moonchild wrote:

RokCoder wrote:

snip

I believe one of the contributing factors to this would be that you might have too many followers? I saw a few people that have a large amount of followers say they won't be getting on trending anymore since they have that large amount of followers. I'm not sure if that was what you were speaking about.

I don't know if that's why, there's plenty of famous people on trending right now

That's odd then, maybe there's a specific amount of times people can be on trending?