The feed algorithm is changing. Here's what you need to know.

Hello CTZens,

We make changes to the feed algorithm all the time in an effort to make the feed as relevant, fun and interesting as possible for each user. To continue this process, we have decided to make a fairly drastic change to the way posts are sorted and selected when viewing a “hot” feed. You can expect to see this change apply to your feed in the next day or so.

We want to make CT the best platform out there that achieves the following things:

• Stay up-to-date with breaking news from the car world
• Share, discover and discuss things with like-minded enthusiasts
• Follow and see content from your favourite personalities, publishers and brands in one place

Until now we have used a very similar ranking system to that used by reddit (and reddit-inspired community sites). We based the rankings on the number of comments and the number of upvotes, with some additional factors like the content type, community, and how often you visit. Posts that get engagement more quickly than other posts “rise” to the top of the feed. They then begin to move back down the feed as they get older.

This worked well to surface popular content throughout the day but it has some limitations. Firstly, it doesn’t work well when combined with following users (as well as topics). If you follow a user, you don’t want to miss out on their posts, even if they aren’t very popular overall. Secondly, as you scroll down the feed, the posts decrease in “hotness” meaning that after page 2 or so, the posts can be quite mixed in quality. It also means that the best posts that are older can’t be found easily and in some cases disappear completely!

“Awesome! How does it work?”

It’s actually pretty simple.

The feed will order all of the posts by publish date. Scroll down to go back in time. Scroll back to where you read up until last time.

Posts from users that you follow will always display on the feed, regardless of how many votes and comments they have.

Editorial articles, editor’s picks, and the occasional sponsored post will always appear on the feed. This is the same as the feed currently behaves.

Posts from your communities will require a certain “hotness” to reach your feed. Once they are deemed “hot” enough by the algorithm they will be inserted into your feed. The “hotness” is very similar to how the old feed works - it’s based on the number of upvotes, comments, and some “magic” that we put in.

There’s one major change to this calculation - communities. Posts from larger and/or more active communities will need more votes/comments to reach the hot feed. This will hopefully help the imbalances between the large and small communities, and it’ll make your main feed more diverse.

We will continuously tweak this balance. As communities grow, posts in those communities will start to need more popularity.

“Okay, so that all applies to the “My Feed” hot sort order, what about the other feeds?”

All Posts: This is sorted by publish date as well, but it will only show posts of a certain “hotness”. It does not include the community weightings in this “hotness” calculation.

Hot feed for communities: Exactly the same as for all posts, but the required “hotness” changes depending on what community you are viewing.

“But I want to see the hottest posts of the day!”

Switch your sorting to “Top” and choose “Top today” or “Last 24 hours” (depends if you are viewing the website or in the app.