It seems to change every time I reload it.
I have no complaints with it, I was confused when yesterday it was completely different from today. It's a reasonable change.
UPDATE: As I mentioned below, and as Saydrah noted, we removed the posts that were already in your feed from the Popular page. However, the 'popular' algorithm did not jive well with the remaining data. In short, it was weighing recent activity too highly. As a result, the popular page posts didn't seem so popular. I've made some changes to the algorithm. My first impression is that the result is more satisfactory, and more fitting of the term.
Are you getting the same thing I am? A page with a bunch of posts that have a few shares, usually 1-3, but none of the "top" posts? In which case, what makes those posts popular?
I think it would be great if mk changed popular to "popular unshared" and unshared to "new unshared." Your hubski experience would be broken into three distinct experiences - your feed, popular posts that aren't in your feed, and brand new posts that aren't in your feed. As Saydrah mentioned, you don't get the "front page" effect that reminds us so much of reddit, and obviously, of the three of those, you're going to spend the most amount of time in your feed. I'd only venture into popular/new when I want to discover new content once I've ran out of links in my feed.
The popular page (unless I'm mistaken) doesn't include people you're following. So apparently you're following people who share a lot of the most popular stuff! A quick glance at your followers shows a lot of the more popular users of Hubski (and me!) so that's probably what happened.
Ah, popular doesn't include them does it! Still getting familiarized with hubski, but that makes sense and would explain why I wasn't seeing anything from people I was following. Thanks for pointing that out! For some reason when I went to follow you it kept unfollowing you...even though I never hit that button, was going to report it but it seems to be fixed now.
I thought about sending you mail about it, because I got like 5 emails saying you followed me, but it seems to have stuck. I figured you just didn't like some of the things I was posting/saying and then reconsidered!
Sorry about the email spam, hubski just really didn't want me to be able to follow you.
It's alright. I'm glad you weren't constantly rethinking following me.
Astral, this is exactly what's going on here. With the current size of the community, it isn't too difficult to get the majority of the most popular posts in your feed. At this point, I think a more accurate name might be 'active' rather than 'popular', because it does in fact measure activity as much as the number of shares. I'm considering changing the weight of activity on the equation to pull up a list of posts that have a greater number of shares.
Maybe calling it "popular externals" would make it more intuitive that your feed isn't there?
'Active' sounds like a great idea! I would love to see separate 'Popular' and 'Most Commented.'