I like the idea of improving the quality of “what’s hot”.
At the moment, the current implementation is pretty weak. Even in this thread, as I’m reading it: Your post is top… even though it’s 25 minutes old and has only 3 upvotes, compared to the second thread which is an hour old and has 39 upvotes.
I can see how Lemmy would benefit by modularizing the “hot” algorithm. This would allow each Lemmy server to install/test their own (or shared) “hotness” algorithm. Eventually, I think, everyone would converge but in the meanwhile it would allow for a rapid exploration of different possibilities.