I've often thought the "Popular Now" section was a little bit buggy, because it sometimes comes up with seemingly random and obscure songs and then they stay on there for long periods of time. I figured that being on the Popular Now list was kind of self-perpetuating, and that what seems obscure to me is just because of my limited perspective.
But one of my translations is on there right now, a translation to Spanish of Shakira's version of Imagine. And I can see for myself that it's not actually very popular right now. It has 10 views and 2 thank-you's, so that seems odd. And I can see it's not driving huge numbers of views to my translation, unless there's a delay I'm not aware of. On the other hand, a few weeks back, my English translation of Danna Paola's TQ Y YA got nearly 2,000 views and probably 10 thank-yous in its first couple of hours and never appeared on the Popular Now section. I was surprised, but I thought maybe 2,000 views was small potatoes for this site, though it was by far the biggest number of single-day views I'd ever seen.
So how does the algorithm work that decides what's popular? And what can be done so that it better reflects actual popularity?
It seems like it should be fairly straightforward if it's controlled by a database. Sort ascending by number of views per day for that day, or perhaps per hour, and limit to the top 5. But maybe we wouldn't want to go purely by numbers, because English, Spanish, and French might be too dominant. Still, I should think that 10 views isn't enough to cross the threshold into "popular."
I know that algorithms require a lot of time, and I don't really understand them, so I'm not necessarily making any suggestions. I'm just wondering if anyone knows more about how it works.
