The PR and optics of this discussion could not be worse and less fortunately timed if someone tried to orchestrate it that way.

Some things happened yesterday that caused a need for us to (quickly) remove a site's eligibility to contribute to the list of hot network questions.

What happened was that someone called SE out on Twitter for something you could conceivably see as problematic (two questions with out of context bad titles showing next to each other in that list). After that, not only was that change done within 40 minutes of it being pointed out, this happened after MONTHS of engaged users of that site asking for the HNQ to be adressed.

Yet, this happens only after Twitter outrage from non-users of the site. Why is that? Even if you have the very best of intentions and had this cooking internally for a long time (which I'm going to just assume for the purposes of this argument - good faith and all), this couldn't possibly have had less fortunate timing.

I'm not trying to rag on Stack Exchange for doing this, but why was such a massive change made without consulting, collecting feedback from or even notifying the site's active user base? Why does an engaged user of IPS have to visit twitter of all places to find out SE has cut out more than half of their site's traffic overnight?

Why wasn't the community consulted on this? We had discussions on it before, a lot of people came down in favor of restricting IPS from showing up on the sidebar in some fashion or another, and now we get this. No feedback, no discussion. Someone that apparently SE wants to placate made a stink on Twitter, and somehow that's more effective than months of constructive reasoning in driving change. What reason, if at all, does an engaged user of the site have to trust the community governance model with this?

If it sounds like I'm really annoyed by this its because I am, yes I was in favor of removing IPS from HNQ before, but the circumstances under which it happened is making me lose all hope I have for SE's leadership's ability to formulate concrete plans to make changes constructively.

First and foremost, I don't understand Tim Post's reticence to say which SE post or posts were "responsible" for the Twitter spat. Which, if I understand correctly, lasted a relatively short time.

The tweet that started the controversy was this

stack exchange: the #1 site for your questions about dataframes and female treachery

The second tweet, which I believe is the one that caused the SE team to internally groan was a retweet by a female developer.

When people seem confused about why Stack Overflow might not be the most welcoming/comfortable place for people to find answers to programming questions, show them this

She then tweeted this

Cool ableism on the front page of a website for dev questions
“How do you tell a Facebook friend that they might be on the autism spectrum?”

The accusation that SO/SE is not inclusive was retweeted... once. Yes, it spread like extra mature cheddar.

The SE developer who removed the site from the HNQ list (Since when has the term "flirting" been unethical?), replied [emphasis mine]

Woof, yeah. I agree that's entirely inappropriate for SO. I just pushed a change to remove questions from that site from the Hot Network sidebar. I'll ping folks internally to review the site's content more closely as well.

Now, here's my main point. If I had been that developer, I would have DEFENDED that question and EXPLAINED that the question is not taken from Stack Overflow, but from a site called Interpersonal Skills. I would have also explained the site's scope and informed the twitter user their sanctimonious reflection and supercilious attitude was based on false presumption. Well, maybe I would have refrained from using the terms sanctimonious and supercilious to soften the tone.

The same twitter user (Twitterer?) point blank refused to engage in any civil discussion when they realised that their high horse didn't have a leg to stand on.

In other words, the management's reaction and the action taken was excessive and unnecessary.

Bring back IPS to the HNQ. They did nothing wrong.

_{Disclaimer: I am no longer a member of IPS, I left that community several months ago. But I bear no grudges to its users, many of whom I secretly admire.}

The HNQ implementation has at least three problems:

• It optimizes for controversy, not quality. Sensationalist questions draw lots of rapid response, which feeds the HNQ algorithm, and then once it's on HNQ it gets even more rapid response, which keeps it there (and also distorts Q&A on that site).

• It's completely automatic; sites have no way to intervene and remove a question short of closing it. But closure is frequently the wrong answer; the question is perfectly valid, but controversial.

• Everybody sees it, all the time. If that list on the side of the page has even one or two "exciting" questions, we can pretty much guarantee that some readers will be upset. (There is a regex filter on titles, but it comes with all of the usual regex challenges.)

If we want to have something like HNQ -- and I've heard enough people on smaller sites saying they value the promotion to go with that for now -- then we need to find a way to let communities curate the content. We should also consider user controls for those who need them. (I get it; I don't want my coworkers to see that question about Klingon mating rituals either.) We should also adjust the algorithm so it doesn't so strongly prefer controversy.

Here are some ideas along those lines:

• To aid curation: provide a way, from the question page, to see if this question is currently hot or likely to become so. If automatically displaying that would be an expensive operation, let's add a way to check. Perhaps checking the hotness score and comparing to the minimum score from the HNQ is good enough; we don't need to actually do the lookup.

• Automatically exclude questions that the community has signalled have issues: protected questions and questions with two or three close votes. (Probably we should make that number adjustable.) More thoughts on this here.

• Give moderators and high-rep users a menu item for "exclude from HNQ" so they can be proactive.

• Suggested in comments: allow communities to review hot questions (also suggested on other answers here)

• Factor downvotes into the hotness formula.

• I don't have concrete suggestions here, but let's review the velocity part of the formula. Lots of answers isn't necessarily a good measure. Lots of quality answers might be, but that's hard to measure. But let's factor answer score and length in more and number less.

• Allow users to (persistently) collapse the HNQ, and start in the collapsed state.

As noted in comments, we should also review the effects of visitors bearing association bonuses on hot questions (should they be able to vote? comment?). I've been focusing here on how questions get (or don't get) to HNQ visibility, and with all the voting that's already happened I don't want to expand the scope of this answer now. Let's use other answers for that part of the problem.

As a user

I love the HNQ list because I really enjoy learning about all manner of diverse topics. A jaunt through the HNQ can see me hopping from Christianity to Physics to Parenting to Aviation to Skeptics to Worldbuilding and so on and so forth. Without the HNQ I wouldn't put in the effort to check for interesting questions on two dozen sites.

For a site

For some beta sites in particular, the HNQ very often brings in a great deal of that site's traffic. Removing an entire site from the HNQ necessarily means taking a road to that site and turning it into a trail. I don't think isolating this or that site for any reason is in keeping with the spirit of the Stack Exchange network.

All that to say: please don't remove the HNQ list from the sidebar. There are certainly ways to improve it and I'm all for that; I'll let others cover that.

Let's stop over-promoting some sites at the cost of other sites rarely making the list at all.

The network has more than 170 sites. Some of them are small and rarely make an appearance on HNQ at all. Others are large and active and can have five or more questions on the list (of 100) at once. That's working against the goal of broadening people's horizons and, on those small sites, can feel kind of crappy (what do we have to do to get some attention already???). Let's fix that.

There are 100 questions at a time on the HNQ, with a random subset shown on each page load. 100 < 170+. Therefore a site's "fair share" of the HNQ real-estate is <1 -- round up to 1.

No site should have more than one active HNQ at a time. Yes, that means that a question might need 50 hotness points on SO and 5 on Astronomy; that's ok. Show us the best hot Astronomy question anyway. And cycle them more quickly, so it's not the same Astronomy question that was there yesterday.

I know that on some sites (most notably SO) the HNQ gate rises with each question already on the list (it's harder to get HNQ #3 than it was to get HNQ #2). I'm proposing a simplification of that: each site gets one, period, and it shouldn't stay there for a week like some HNQs do now.

Just to start, I'm going to run down a few of the problems I have with the HNQ, as it currently stands:

• It does a terrible job of promoting good questions from the really small sites that could use the exposure the most. I can count on one hand the number of HNQ questions Astronomy has had within the last three months, I think.
• It's optimized for hot questions, not good questions. There's a difference, and arguably, question quality and activity can be orthogonal in some cases. I'll claim that the very best questions don't get 10 answers within an hour. The problem is, what makes a question good can be hard to objectively determine.
• It doesn't look at the actual content of the questions. At all. It's blind to what topics are represented, and that, too, can be a problem, skewing the HNQ questions of a given site to certain subsets of its scope.
• We, the users, have essentially zero control over whether a questions makes it to the HNQ or not. We don't have control over how a prime tool for evangelism and outreach is used.

So, here are some point-by-point solutions:

• Guarantee every site, no matter what the size, one HNQ question per period, by essentially adjusting the requirements on each site for a question to make the HNQ. And I mean making big adjustments to thresholds, whatever they may be.
• Maybe let the community choose certain questions to get more attention - i.e. let each site create a "Best of" list of questions from the past X days they might want promoted (maybe with X=14?). I'm thinking of some sort of voting process on meta. An issue with this, of course, is that it probably requires some manual work, but - and correct me if I'm wrong, since I've got no technical expertise here - we could use a system similar to the one that determines whether community ads are displayed.
• Urg, I can't really think of ways to get around some topics being overrepresented among a site's HNQ questions. Maybe that's not an issue?
• See the second bullet point, here. I'd love a "Best of" list, with a couple questions to be shown on the sidebar every week.

Basically, I care about the HNQ bringing attention to sites that need it, and doing a good job of representing site scope. By ensuring representation among all the sites - or as many as possible - we can cultivate growth. Heck, the HNQ is how I found Worldbuilding four years ago, a site I now moderate. I also want more control over what questions we feature, which is why letting sites collectively pick the best questions from the past 1-2 weeks would be nice.

Please, please get rid of the clickbait

When you say this

they've been sufficient for ensuring [...] overt clickbait was kept out of the list for the most part

y'all are just utterly fooling yourselves and/or burying your heads in the sand. HNQ absolutely selects for clickbait. It's what makes it tick — it wouldn't be what it is right now without it. And it's what fills it with terrible posts instead of picking stuff from the vast barrels of useful content on the network.

And, frankly, it's an absolute shame.

• Stack Exchange shines because of its quality content.
• Clickbait just isn't quality content. (And even if it was quality content originally, if you just slap a clickbait title on it and show it to enough people, that deluge of traffic that's uninterested in the real qualities of the content is just going to skew it so much that it ceases to be.)

So what on Earth is clickbait doing on Stack Exchange? We've been calling the sidebar the SE-Wide Advertisement for General Enlightenment for some time now.

(Which isn't to say that it is always dreadful, and indeed I'm not above hijacking some of the HNQ mechanisms if it helps produce an effective piece of science communication. But it's a mistake to put the cart before the horse, i.e., to emphasize the make-HNQ-do-good-things aspect above the don't-let-HNQ-do-awful-stuff part.)

The key problem with HNQ that causes it to select so strongly on clickbait is its intrinsic dependence on a positive-feedback loop:

• If a question is on the list, it gets a bunch of traffic which brings with it a bunch of upvotes for the questions and the answers.
• The 'hotness' score that determines whether a question stays on the list is a direct measure of how many upvotes it gets.

The clickbaitier the title, the more traffic, the more upvotes, the higher the question and answer scores, the higher the 'hotness' scores, the longer the question stays around, the more the traffic, and round and round it goes until the votes saturate. You're basically trying to fight a positive exponential with an algebraic time decay, and if you were paying attention in math class, you know who wins that fight. And, moreover, the exponent on that exponential is basically just how clickbaity the title is. Way to go.

This isn't a new observation, either — by sheer coincidence, Breaking the HNQ feedback loop on bad questions is on the brink of turning two years old, with zero attention or engagement from the SE community or dev teams. If you guys had turned up and said "but perfooooormaaaaance" at the time, then we'd have had the opportunity to convince you that you're wrong about that.

Anyways, I stand by my proposed solution to the positive-feedback problems from two years ago:

Let association-bonus users vote on HNQs, but don't count those votes and views into whatever algorithm does the decision that a question is Hot.

Cut the feedback loop, and see the exponential die out.

And of course, since you've spent a great deal of time detailing how performance constraints are a real solution-buster in these parts, let me spend some time detailing how those constraints don't apply to this solution. The modified-hotness score is indeed a much more expensive construct, absolutely, but here's the thing:

You only need to calculate the modified-hotness score for a few hundred questions at a time.

Internally within each site, use the regular hotness score. (Or tweak it, if required.) You only need to start discarding association-bonus votes from the hotness scores after it gets on the list, and those are a manageable set.

This comes down to a point made by gnat earlier: the dev team's attitude over the past few years has consistently had notes of looking at the fanciest way to implement the requested feature, saying "that's not doable", and then shutting down their involvement with the discussion. Instead of, as gnat suggests, looking at the resources you do have and then looking at what can be achieved with those.

I wasn't going to go out on a limb but since a statement has been made...

The list of questions is generated through a very expensive query, cached, and refreshed on a set schedule. Giving moderators or even community managers the ability to 'evict' a problematic title while keeping the system in check with what we consider performant and sane are .. mutually-exclusive goals.

...I would like to address that.

This is technically inaccurate up to the point of being totally misleading, as was explained in multiple prior discussions, eg here, here, here and here.

Whatever feedback from community / moderators we would want to take into account, reasonably close "approximate" solution can be achieved with negligible (constant time) performance impact.

Specifically, system can first pick larger than 100 (that is 150, 200, 300 etc) amount of "candidate" questions for the hot list using the very same query as it uses now - and this step will be as performant as it is now.

And at the second step, system could take into account whatever feedback / adjustments we would want to make on these candidate questions (fixed amount of them, meaning it's a constant time cost) and filter out 100 final questions to pass to the hot list.

While we're at it, there is another myth that hasn't been mentioned yet but is quite likely to pop up in further discussion, namely that it is prohibitively difficult to track and share meaningful information about questions that get to hot list - such as changes in views, votes, "hotness score" etc.

This is based on a statement that hot questions change way too frequently (every few minutes) so that retrieving, storing, and using much details about 100 questions at such a high rate is not feasible. While compelling on a surface, this reasoning is not really bulletproof because if you think of it, it is not absolutely necessary to catch up at such a high rate to get usable tracking data.

It is entirely possible to get reasonably solid "approximation" by sampling at much lower rate - we could retrieve desired details once in 1, 2, 5, 10 etc hours - and that would give us totally manageable amount of data that would be close enough to use in whatever way we would want.

For example, this "downsampled" tracking data could be used to inform site moderators of questions that likely entered hot list in a few recent hours. This data can be also stored and later used for historical analysis, and since sampling rate is low, this won't be too hard resource wise. Etc etc etc.

Speaking of goals for having HNQ, as of now I don't have strong preferences about this. Main point of this answer is to explain that whatever goal we set here, there will likely be technically feasible way to implement and track things "approximating" it with reasonable accuracy.

You know, it sometimes looks like SE team invents artificially complicated problems as if to justify doing nothing when it comes to hot questions. The starting post of this very discussion seems to be yet another case of that kind. Here I am talking about obsession with problematic titles and how it is difficult to deal with these.

But really, this seem to be missing one simple question, what makes clickbait titles stick so much in the hot list? For those who know how system works the answer is obvious: these titles by their very nature tend to attract multiple answers and the system is currently configured to make it count most.

Titles are totally secondary here and those who pay attention to stuff that gets to hot list can remember examples proving that - specifically "big list" questions (at sites allowing these) easily get and stick into the list despite having fairly bland titles - purely because of many answers.

Two IPS questions that started recent turmoil make good example: one of these was fairly old but system still kept it in the hot list because it had ten answers. This is because question with that many answers can easily have "hotness score" many times higher than one with, say, 3-5 answers: "The benefit of many answers is capped at 10".

• ^{Visitors of hot questions and maybe especially regulars of the sites that contribute most to the hot list may wonder why system is configured that way, why it keeps accounting for answers up to 10 and not to some other number. To understand that you need to realise that this was set many years ago when hot list was totally different, it was almost exclusively dominated by questions from about handful technically oriented sites. Back then, this parameter didn't really matter much so I guess it was picked without much thinking - and worked fairly well until SE network has grown and much expanded with new topics.}

You see, above suggests that thing worth trying is to change that old parameter in hotness score formula from 10 to something like 3 or 4 or 5. This has a good chance to tame artificial domination of clickbait titles. Especially if you take into account that per se, these titles are more likely at disadvantage because many active regulars at hosting sites consider such titles poor and vote down for this reason. It is only that outdated setting in the system that sticks them in hot list, totally inorganically.

Though given how two issues mentioned before were handled I would expect this natural approach to be ignored. Instead we will probably see team wasting efforts on something like inventing regexes to detect possible sexual interpretation of the title or trying to involve target site regulars in cumbersome race to catch and edit this stuff manually before it starts bothering our Twitter overlords. Maybe they will even block other sites besides IPS, "because titles".

I submit that HNQ is fundamentally broken. Why? Because it is about Hot Network Questions. That is, questions which are getting lots of attention.

Just look at your #1 goal: increase site discovery. Questions which get lots of attention rarely represent the best of a site. Controversial questions are "hot", and therefore will attract people attracted to that controversy. But are such people going to become regular users of the site?

No. Or worse... yes. I say that them staying is worse because people who are attracted to controversy are people who will inevitably create controversy (or at least fuel it). And that's not what we're supposed to be doing here.

Worst-case, controversial questions can give people the wrong idea of the culture or scope of a site. This is also why your #2 goal is problematic. Reassessing the scope of a site should not be done due to a mob of people who randomly showed up thanks to an algorithm. It should be done carefully and deliberately.

And all of this comes down to "Hot" questions. If we want to attract the right sort of people to a site, then that can only be done by promoting questions that demonstrate the best face of the site, not merely the one that has attracted lots of attention.

I hate sounding pessimistic since it's really not my style, nor do I want to tread in already covered ground that Monica and Magisch have already broached. But I will say this much: I'm not sure that we're really having a "discussion" about this. This is more of a venting period, and then we all move on from it.

As evidenced by...

Suffice to say, the HNQ (as we know it) is now looking at numbered days, but that number is probably kind of high because it's going to take some work to figure out what voids would be worth filling if we yanked it as we know it now.

We're going to talk about this feature before we remove this feature.

Okay.

To be less sarcastic about this, I'll give you an outsider's perspective. I was contemplating joining the IPS community because of the seemingly interesting topics that were being discussed. I've even perused a handful of them and many of the answers provided seemed insightful and useful. Some of those titles wouldn't be ones I would want to click at work, but even then, I'm an adult and I know that the Internet is full of content which may be inflammatory or spark a heated discussion, so I've worked around this by...simply not paying it much attention while at work, and leaving an open tab to come back to it when I have a quiet moment on break.

Kinda like browsing Facebook or Reddit.

^{And no soul here can say they've never done either of those activities while at work.}

But it seems to be fairly standard practice nowadays with Stack Exchange that someone from outside of the network decides to point out a flaw or two, and changes happen overnight whereas well-thought discussions or communities willing to talk about these issues are simply...well, abandoned.

The Stack Exchange network's greatest strength is its community. Brushing that aside is proving to be the greatest single mistake that's been made.

I get it; we're not the most pleasant bunch of people to solicit feedback from. We're passionate, obstinate at times and think we know better. But shutting out an entire community from the discussion around this whole thing was a backhanded move, even if the whole HNQ flow is broken and even if it was going to be the right thing to do.

And I know I said I didn't want to sound pessimistic, but that's kind of how I feel about this whole thing now. You're going to do what you see fit with this feature. I could come up with some new ideas as to what the actual point of this whole feature is, and prove where it's strongest and weakest, as well as allowing people to see this content if they opt in to it.

But I'm not convinced you'll listen to me or anyone else in this discussion.

Prove me wrong. Please.

Please don't listen to Twitter

It seems that SE management is giving tweets a higher priority than community feedback. Just as an example: the Code of Conduct has been triggered by tweets, not by community discussion or by management decision. It seems, that if we want change on SE to happen, we have to tweet our wishes, and SE management will listen. One tweet has obviously more weight than 1000 meta posts.

How should we deal with complaints from Twitter?

If you think a complaint from Twitter is right, just post about it on Meta and resolve it from there. A tweet must not hold more weight than a comment or question or answer on a meta site.

I think it is a big shame that tweets have so much power upon Stack Exchange Management.

It seems like the priorities of SE management are:

• make feminists on Twitter happy
• make new users feel welcome
• listen to the community

in this order. SE says that they value their long term community members. But actions speak louder than words. I ask for a change. I'm angry and annoyed. Would you listen to my anger if I posted it on Twitter? My trust in SE management has just gone away.

The fact that an entire site could be blacklisted from the Hot Network Questions list by a single SE employee because they saw someone complain on Twitter about the word "flirting" and the phrase "sleep with me" appearing on the HNQ list is highly disturbing. Using this new standard, we need to blacklist most of the other popular sites as well. In no particular order:

Workplace

"How can I stop a college from flirting with me?" - would be on topic as long as it related to workplace interactions. But let's not consider hypotheticals. There are some great examples of actual questions!

"How should I deal with an employee who has slept with my wife?" is the second highest voted question on the site.

There are also questions about flirting.

And if we're strictly talking about question titles looking bad out of context, there is "How can I prepare for getting hit by a bus?".

Sure, these could be overlooked as not too serious. So let’s look at some other examples!

Academia

Academia has some great examples as well:

"Had sex with a student of mine, how to proceed now?"

"I slept with my advisor's daughter and she is blackmailing me now. What can I do?"

This second one was actually on the HNQ list for a few days, before being closed - long after the question had gotten its attention.

Travel

This site has a few titles that would look great out of context:

"Is it permitted to ask questions of female sex workers in Thailand to be familiar with their real life as a tourist?"

"Are laws about sex outside marriage less rigorously enforced in Dubai for people on layovers?"

Role-Playing Games

Not as bad, but still an example:

"As a DM, is it improper of me to flirt with one of my players 'off the clock'?"

Movies

"Are Terminator robots able to have sex?"

"Mimi knows she has HIV but still wants to have sex with Roger?"

World Building

"How can a demon who feeds on sex survive in the modern world without exposing itself?"

"How can a parasite that feeds on sex take over a human biochemically?"

"how can you place limits on sex-fueled magic?"

Science Fiction & Fantasy

"Artificial organ on humans for sex?"

"How does human-robot sex work?"

"Can Bruce Banner Have Sex Without Becoming the Hulk?"

Parenting

This answer is to make the point that IPS was not a problem, it was merely an indicator of the flawed HNQ system. I hesitate to bring up these next examples because with the various changes SE has been making recently, they might actually blacklist Parenting.

"My son is 5 years old and sexually active"

"How do parents have sex when there's a toddler in the house?"

"Sex play in young children"

"My daughter is having sex with her cousin"

"Is it possible for an 8 year girl to be sexually abused and enjoy it?"

"My son's girlfriend has been cheating with my best friend's son. Should I get involved?"

"How do I change my son's views, after he confessed to me that he rather be with prostitutes over having an actual girlfriend?"

Law

This is another site that I hesitate to bring up in light of the recent decisions made by SE, but it has great examples.

"Did my girlfriend rape me? Sexual assault? Nothing?"

"If an adult is raped by a minor, is it statutory rape?"

"Is it rape to have sex with a man without disclosing that one is a male-to-female transgender?"

"If two individuals who are too drunk to give consent have sex are both guilty of rape?"

"Posting Sex Offender Information Online"

"The legality of fictional stories involving sex with minors"

The statement "Let's ignore sites with these titles" isn't being applied fairly. It seems that all we need to do now is start posting on Twitter about how offended we are. After all - if the above sites contain content like that and can still appear on the HNQ list, someone might post a similar question, it might get on the HNQ list, and someone who doesn't want to take the effort to look at the context of the question could be offended!

Is this a side effect of trying to be "welcoming" to everyone?

Put the decision to participate in the hands of the community

Some sites have asked to be excluded from the HNQ. Giving sites the choice to put themselves onto the existing blacklist might be useful, and would involve the community that has to shoulder most of the negative side effects into the decision.

Give the community a way to experiment with the exact formula

This might not be possible with a reasonable amount of effort, but it would be very interesting to have the ability to simulate alternative HNQ formulas. It would probably have to be based on a snapshot of data because it's expensive, but even that could help to find better ways to select HNQ.

Allow users to collapse the HNQ sidebar

Currently users don't have a choice whether they see the HNQ or not. Give them a choice, and there are fewer reasons to complain about inappropriate titles. If you don't want to see the HNQ, simply switch them off.

Limit the self-reinforcing aspect of the formula

A question with a lot of activity has a better chance to get into the HNQ. A question in the HNQ list often gets drastically more activity and votes than without it. Maybe only counting votes from users that have contributions on the site could help.

Normalize between the sites better

Some sites are clearly overrepresented in the list. Normalizing the formula for differences in voting behaviour and other factors might help to avoid focusing on the problematic sites so much, and bring some smaller sites into the spotlight.

Allow us to hide/show the HNQ sidebar and control which sites are allowed in it!

Like some others are saying, start with the HNQ list hidden, something like:

Hot Network Questions (show) ⚙️

On clicking "(show)," the usual list will drop down, showing only "non-controversial" sites (excluded sites like those you list in the main question). On clicking the settings gear, the user is taken to their "Site Preferences" page and scrolled down to the "HNQ Sidebar" section.

Here they can set whether the list is by default shown/hidden when the site is visited. They may also see which sites they allow to be shown and which they don't in their HNQ sidebar. Perhaps those sites we deem "controversial" will be marked so in the list (maybe with a link to see what some of those controversial questions may look like?).

This solution will do a couple things: it'll let those who like what we have now to keep what we have now, while letting those who want less HNQ in their lives to have less HNQ in their lives. This could also allow you to see more questions you like. Maybe you have the same length HNQ list regardless of how many sites you're watching, so now questions with fewer hotness points that would normally not make the full HNQ list will make your custom list!

^{Note: I think the contents of the HNQ list itself definitely need to be revisited as has been detailed in other answers, but this answer is focused on how we'll view that list.}

HNQ is intended to show users other sites. There's no assumption that they'll be experts on the topic; the assumption is that they are simply interested. With that end goal in mind, some suggestions:

Showcase older questions rather than currently active ones

Why does good content have to be current content? More often than not, current questions are undergoing some form of discussion to figure out what the questioner wants, and the traffic from HNQ just muddies that discussion. A two-day old, well-received question (upvoted question, upvoted answers) is probably a better way to showcase the site's best content.

Choose just a few sites, show upvoted front page content there

Rather than choosing "hot network questions", only showcase a few sites (3-5) each pageload. On the next pageload you could showcase a different few sites. Over time each visitor will see a wide variety of content from a wide variety of sites.

Choose from either well-received current questions or—as per previous recommendation—well-received older questions. This rotation will still benefit sites, and over time visitors will see that there's more to this place than just <site they happen to be on>.

I'll add my 0.02€.

As prompted by the question, I'll start saying that I came to Aviation, the site I am now a mod of, through the HNQ.

I think that the list is a good tool to discover new sites, but given the following conditions:

• the user is in a setting that allows them to look for new sites, i.e.: not in an office

• the user is open to experience new sites

• the user is familiar with the network and knows/can guess before clicking where the question comes from

I'll expand on the last one, since I think it was behind the message that started this.

If a user only ever visits the network to go on SO, and has no idea that there are other sites beyond that, or is not even aware of the concept of "network sites", those questions tell them "this are good questions for a professional website like SO".
This is fine if they come from SU, or any other IT-related site, as the userbase will greatly overlap with SO, but is already less fine with sites like mine or Politics or Skeptics (examples of sites I frequent) because these can be seen as odd, given the environment.
"I am here to work, what is a question about the elections of a country I don't care about doing on the side of the page?" "I don't care about aircraft, why is that question there?".
At the end of the spectrum you have the reactions that started this: "oh, great, the site I come to for technical advice is filled with male tropes, how nice"

Possible solution:

1. hide the sidebar for new users by default
2. have a small panel saying "SO is part of a network of several sites, would you like to know more?"
3. if they want to know more, bring the user to a page where you clearly explain that in the network there are technical sites, as well as less technical ones
4. explain what the HNQ is and what they will see if they opt to see it
5. let a user opt-in the HNQ based on the macro categories you have here:
   • All
   • Technology
   • Culture / Recreation
   • Life / Arts
   • Science
   • Professional
   • Business

There are plenty of answers here that explain problems with the almost NSFW nature of some of the questions, the promotion of click-bait titles and the positive feedback cycle introduced by the HNQ.

They are all about how the quality of one site is hurt by having inappropriate links to another site.

However, I want to emphasize at one particular aspect that bothers me more: the cost to the target site.

While the HNQ might help a site by attracting new users to it, it is often actively harmful to the particular question that it links to.

Even if the question is a genuinely good question that isn't click-bait, it can be hurt by making an appearance on the HNQ.

The HNQ attracts a lot of users who aren't from the target community. Their votes are wildly distorting and their answers and comments don't follow the community standards.

The site I frequent most, Skeptics.SE, gets hoards of users upvoting unreferenced, theoretical answers - especially if they are politically partisan - which is an anathema to the entire reason for the site.

But we are not alone. I see comments above such as these that I want to highlight:

+1 The HNQ absolutely optimises for controversy. On RPG.SE the effect of a HNQ is often also pretty bad: if we've got a controversial, difficult topic it needs careful community cultivation, expert answers, and highly knowledgeable voters more than ever... Then it hits HNQ and we see an influx of dozens of votes upvoting poor advice in exponential proportion to whatever the scores already were, amplifying the fastest gun and drowning out up-and-coming better advice completely. That effect is a disservice to everyone and degrades the quality of help RPG.SE provides. – @doppelgreener Link

and

@doppelgreener: Philosophy has this problem as well. Controversial questions that have "God" in their title are regularly on the HNQ, even if they are ill-stated, unclear, etc. and attract a high number of opinionated comments and answers of which two-thirds have to be deleted. The only other things popping up there are similarly bad questions on evolution and quantum mechanics/free will. I have yet to see a well-stated question on philosophy in this list. Yes, it helps with traffic for smaller sites. But I doubt that it is traffic we want to have on these sites. – @PhilipKlöcking Link

Many of the programming-related sites have the benefit that upvoting tends to be clear cut. Questions are only of interest to relevant experts, answers tend to be clear cut (they objectively work or they don't), and non-experts have no desire to jump in and express opinions or vote. They may welcome questions appearing on the HNQ, knowing that they will only attract other experts. Some of the other sites don't have that luxury.

What's the solution?

• The community needs a way to say "This question is receiving bad attention - stop advertising it."

• Reconsider approaches that don't assume people are experts in every field just because they are programmers - e.g.:

  • The association bonus should not enable users to vote on every site

  • Prevent 101 rep users from voting and commenting until 105 rep

  • Prevent questions on Hot List from being upvoted by casual visitors (only rep is from association bonus)

• Perhaps apply limits to what people can do when they come through the HNQ link.

This has already been brought up tangentially in some answers, but:

Do HNQs really need to be that fresh?

The vast majority of the problems arise from HNQs being selected by an algorithm only. The only reason I see for having it done this way is that you want eligible questions on the list as soon as possible. While I can understand that advertising yesteryear’s questions there is against the point, I don’t see why we cannot wait a while to let humans decide.

As a brief sketch, I would suggest the following:

• Once a question has acquired enough hotness, place it in the moderator queue of that site, where moderators can forward it to the actual HNQ list or reject it.
• Provide moderators with some guidelines regarding titles, content, and so on.
• Of course, moderators can also use this opportunity to polish the question (in particular the title), perform some comment clean-up, or protect it pre-emptively.

On most big sites, this should impose a delay of a few hours to half a day. On slower sites, it may take a while longer, but then those sites are slower anyway, so the delay doesn’t matter that much to them.

I do think keeping it is a good thing. I know for myself, it's introduced me to sites and topics I'd not have expected to see on SE, and I know for younger sites, it can be yet another way to get a critical mass of people in the days when you really need them because no one knows about you yet. Sure, not all of those people stick around, and sure, not all of those people are there for more than like...rubbernecking at what feels like an impending drama storm, but there is good in it.

I know what happened to cause this, but I feel like the reaction was kinda throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of sites have problems sometimes with "offputting" sorts of titles (I moderate Arqade, so I have some awareness of how an honest title can sound highly weird to people who don't know what's going on, and on the flip side, I have experience with having to bop things over the head when people (myself included!) sometimes have a little too much fun with titles), but I think there are ways to potentially deal with that beyond just going "this sucks lets toss it out".

I think there are a few problems, though - number one is that anything controversial is going to pop up there. Which causes more eyes, which causes more...everything, which causes more "hotness" and thus it lurks in the list when it might not be the best and brightest that site has to offer.

In a way, maybe we should be looking less at "hotness" and more like, perhaps, some sort of curated list of "the best and brightest"? I am not sure how much filtering can be done, but if there was a way to be like "these are actual good examples of current questions that are a good example of the awesome we are bringing to the SE table", that would go a long way.

Also, I think there needs to be a way for individual questions to be pulled based on the community/mods/whoever going "okay nope, this is not what we want to be known for". I think something like that might have helped this last issue. And if we can get some sort of notification that something has hit HNQ, that would also be good - then no one is surprised at the sudden attention, we know what potholes we might fall into if something that needs some title nudging/editing gets there so we can work with it, etc. Right now, there's not much we can do short of closing a question, and that's not always the best fit - title alone might not make it a bad/unworthy site question, it just might not work as something shoved to people who didn't ask to be here in the first place.

Also, I have seen a number of proposals that maybe HNQ should be opt-in/opt-out, or at the very least, collapsible or something - so I can interact with it if I want, but if I am only here for my cooking questions/programming questions/dog care questions, I don't have to worry about seeing something from Parenting/Workplace/IPS/Arqade etc that might not be my jam so much.

I have added some more analysis on IPS meta using (give or take) two weeks of data. This can be found here.

To give an idea what the presence/absence of HNQ does to a site, these are the Google analytics data for pageviews for IPS the last week:

date        page views  visits  new visits
2018-10-10  24496       9315    2718
2018-10-11  31098       11335   2748
2018-10-12  33044       12596   2781
2018-10-13  11883       6289    2271
2018-10-14  12796       7059    2518
2018-10-15  40497       16328   3491
2018-10-16  29594       12672   3350
2018-10-17  13698       5801    2608

Halfway through Tuesday the 16th the removal happened, making Wednesday the 17th the first full day of data we have. Comparing that to the Monday before, the traffic is ~33% of what it used to be, comparing to the same day a week before, it is 54% of what it was.

That is however including the traffic generated by this incident, so the final numbers might be even lower.

Let's compare this Wednesday to Wednesdays in the past:

    Week `page views`
   <dbl>        <int>
 1    25        31861
 2    26        29288
 3    27        26134
 4    28        50706
 5    29        49773
 6    30        32966
 7    31        41723
 8    32        30800
 9    33        19670
10    34        35570
11    35        20137
12    36        28289
13    37        27842
14    38        29110
15    39        40004
16    40        20902
17    41        24496
18    42        13698

Lower, but those values are kinda all over the place, so let's compare it with what we might expect based on how this week started.

I am comparing Monday to Wednesday, because Monday is the last complete day of this week with HNQ, and Wednesday is the first complete day afterwards.

    Week Monday Wednesday RatioWedToMon
   <dbl>  <int>     <int>         <dbl>
 1    26  22842     29288         1.28 
 2    27  28242     26134         0.925
 3    28  39476     50706         1.28 
 4    29  43726     49773         1.14 
 5    30  44029     32966         0.749
 6    31  42273     41723         0.987
 7    32  34528     30800         0.892
 8    33  31826     19670         0.618
 9    34  26157     35570         1.36 
10    35  30651     20137         0.657
11    36  23212     28289         1.22 
12    37  24193     27842         1.15 
13    38  25534     29110         1.14 
14    39  44303     40004         0.903
15    40  26644     20902         0.784
16    41  24323     24496         1.01 
17    42  40497     13698         0.338

That's a stark difference. Looking at the summary statistics of the ratio before this week, we can see that week 42 is a definite outlier.

     Ratio       
 Min.   :0.6180  
 1st Qu.:0.8651  
 Median :0.9971  
 Mean   :1.0061  
 3rd Qu.:1.1678  
 Max.   :1.3599

On average, the traffic is equal between Monday and Wednesday; this week that was a third.

Fitting a simple linear model on the previous weeks: lm(data = train, formula = Wednesday ~ Monday)

Coefficients:
             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)   
(Intercept) 6185.6933  7634.4636   0.810  0.43136   
Monday         0.7978     0.2316   3.445  0.00395 **

It's not a perfect model, but I don't have an awful lot of data to work with. Based on this, we would predict a traffic of ~38500. In reality, this was 13698, or 65% lower than expected.

Gist with my code. I don't think I'm allowed to share the Google Analytics data sadly.

The titles of these questions, out of context, are just too likely to be inappropriate on our professional and academic sites, so we took the site out of the contributing list.

To be honest, when speaking just for myself (and probably a part of the IPS community too)... I don't mind being 'the one site that's out of the mix' for a while. It offers some interesting opportunities for IPS, such as some breathing room to actually moderate our questions and answers, and see just how much voting coming in from HNQ skews the view on what a quality answer on IPS is.

That said... This would've gone much, much better if there had been some warning, some discussion, on IPS first. Even if that means a programmer from SO coming into our meta, saying 'HEY! your question titles could be improved upon a lot, that would really make my day'. I guess we wouldn't be having the entire discussion right now then.

But now that we're having it, you have a set of goals... let's see if there's other ways to meet them.

They help with discovery. User interviews continue to reveal that folks simply don't often discover just how big of a resource we've become collectively. The list boosts engagement in quite a few ways (we'll admit some of them aren't optimal)

Perhaps a thing to do this would be to feature some sites, some topics, instead of questions? Have some kind of sidebar 'advertisement', that invites people over to discover the site, instead of reading it's currently most contentious question? Have a list of 'featured' sites? Of 'Hot Network Sites'?

A personalized list, like Glorfindel suggests, sounds great but it constructs some kind of 'social media bubble': it doesn't get you out of your comfort zone the way HNQ currently does. It's okay, but then you'd probably have to give up on the goal of reaching new people with new stuff. I'm personally quite fond of that functionality. It's made me discover more of the SE network than just StackOverflow, and I wouldn't be a moderator on IPS now without HNQ breaking into my bubble and introducing me to a part of the network called 'Interpersonal Skills'.

Linking just the site instead of a post would mean that there's no huge reputation gains for people asking a question or writing an answer anymore, instead, hopefully, traffic to a site is distributed more evenly across posts, instead of just among the three posts in HNQ. This could be a blessing and a curse, I don't have any data to back up this claim, just thoughts.

They often remind communities to have discussions about scope. If folks see a clear demand for certain kinds of questions, it's worth revisiting conversations about how valuable finding ways to meet those needs might be.

This one is hard. Perhaps the people that do land on a site due to an advertisement will start asking their own questions, will write answers to the questions of their interest, will feel free to ask 'Hey, your site was advertised to me, can I ask about X here?'

To be honest, I again don't see much difference here between either advertising the entire site vs. just a question. Even if people see just a question, it's going to give them pretty much the same impression as a good advertisement for your site will do.

Hot questions are extremely great fodder for evangelists, the kinds of people that reach thousands of folks that are likely to identify with the way we do Q&A.

Those people likely need a way to keep track of what's hot across the network. Perhaps this doesn't need to be featured in a side-bar though. You could feature the 50 hottest sites right now, and have more sites (and thus questions) in your Hot Network Sites than you get posts in your Hot Network Questions. You can have a list of hot questions per site? Let's face it, there's more sites than just IPS that generally have more than 1 question in HNQ. The only downside to this would be that whatever happens, really really low traffic sites will still end up on the short side of the bargain and not gain much exposure.

All in all, I'm sure there's other ways to reach out to your evangelists. Try and find out how much work those evangelists are willing to do to get their material, what would they like to see? If they know where to find HNQ, perhaps a single link (instead of a list of question links) to the general HNQ site may work fine. Or make that list collapsible.

Automatic selection simply will not scale if we continue to push the limits of subjective topic spaces, and we need to continue to do that for the network to grow and remain relevant to the issues folks want to use our software creatively to solve.

I would warn against making too much of the selection manual though. Currently, the algorithm relies heavily on actions taking by the community (voting on question/answers and answering the question) to get a question into HNQ in the first place. Taking that away from the community and putting it in moderators hands may be less than ideal. But I also don't know if you can expect the community to manually keep coming up with good posts to put in HNQ, the 'best answer of the past three months' contest on IPS died out due to lack of interest.

Suggestions like 'allow moderators to pick what reaches HNQ' carry the big downside that if moderators do get that power, we basically can decide who wins the imaginary internet points lottery and who has to scrounge through dustbins for next points. That's not really fair to users, and it's not really fair to moderators either. I'm expecting a lot of complaints if people are given too much power to select what can reach something like HNQ.

I prefer being able to blame something automatic when someone complains about reputation from HNQ not being fair ;)

The same goes for some of the points Monica mentions, like giving moderators the power to exclude questions from HNQ. Maybe the question asker really, really wants their question out of HNQ. But is it really fair for us to take down a question, just because a single person wants to? We'd be robbing honest answer writers of their exposure too.

Excluding protected questions carries a risk too. People already find it 'elitist' sometimes that they can't answer a question due to it being protected. How would people like it if three nasty people with malicious intent answered a question, just to get their answers downvoted/deleted, and the community user to protect a question, which will lead to it's protection and it being taken out of HNQ? As long as the metrics for protection are visible, and every community member with a certain amount of reputation can protect/unprotect stuff... I'm expecting a lot of trouble by implementing such a system.

I really like the HNQ, and have often learned about interesting topics because of it. I would hate to see it go, and I don't think it actually has serious problems. The fact that SO felt the need to remove some items from it after a random person on Twitter complained about it seems like an overreaction to me.

(Those IPS questions looked genuine, asked in good faith, on-topic for the site and correctly titled. I hope you're not going to censor contentious subjects; one of the most interesting questions I saw in the HNQ recently was titled "My 3 year old thinks she's white; should I correct her?")

Having said that, there is one thing about the HNQ that annoys me immensely: the fact that I can't choose to hide certain sites. I have no interest whatsoever in Gandalf, Dumbledore or R2D2, or what type of stone victims of the Petrification spell turn into, or whether it is a sin to ride a unicycle on Tuesdays in a certain religion.

The fact that a lot of the tiny site icons are similar and hard to recognize means I'm often halfway through reading a title in the HNQ when I realize it's from one of the nonsensical sites.

So please, let me click somewhere so I never have to see Role-Playing Games, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Christianity, Buddhism, ... ever again. (But don't group them into categories, because I quite enjoy World Building, e.g.)

(Of course you don't have to agree with my selection of uninteresting sites, because that is part of the point I'm making: everyone will have a different selection.)

And in the spirit of causing tons of people to flood into a single discussion, I'm going to feature this; I just can't help it.

There you go, you already have the solution. Give trusted users the ability to tag questions as featured. Then apply the arbitrary hotness points calculator to the featured questions to determine which ones to show in the HNQ list.

Alternatively, create a featured review queue where questions that have enough arbitrary hotness points get placed. If enough trusted users vote to make the question featured, it automatically gets the tag and shows up in the HNQ list.

If a site wants a question off the HNQ list, all they need to do is remove the special featured tag.

Well this has whole debacle been saddening and enlightening.

As a silly example:

If that or this was a twitter rant instead of a meta post we never would have had another hat that depicts meat. No "Taco Tuesday Any Day," no "Extra Toppings" etc. Contrast that with what actually happened there.

Can we just take a step back here and think about what happened to spark the HNQ change.
A non SE user complains on twitter and nearly instantly the "offending" site is blacklisted.
Just read that last sentence there again. Persons, issues, money and politics aside that is crazy.

I am very disappointed in how SE handled this situation. Putting aside the end result, (the end does not justify the means) what SE did was shameful. In about 40 minutes SE had decided to unilaterally dis an entire site in the network, to placate an offended person on twitter. SE did not stand up for itself, for its (perfectly acceptable and on topic) content, for its mods, or its users. We got nothing but a knee jerk reaction along the lines of "Eek a semi famous self proclaimed feminist activist said something bad about SE. We don't want to look bad. Quick throw IPS under the bus, and pull everything." To quote a line from a post Monica Cellio wrote about this:

I feel like placating one person on Twitter is more important to you [SE] than doing right by your moderators and communities.

I would have much more faith in SE, and feel better about this if you (SE) had either responded from the company, and had a meta and or blog post for what you are going to do about the "HNQ issue". Or skipped responding on twitter (remember phases like "adding fuel to the fire" and "don't feed the trolls") and just went straight to a community post. (This question would of been a much better way of starting.)

No instead we get a really bad taste in our mouth, and a feeling that SE cares more about its inclusive and diverse image then about its users and content.

Now Tim I know you will read this, I'm not upset at you, in fact I'm glad that there is a messenger between the inner workings of SE and us. I know you had to handle a pretty ugly situation. I trust that everybody responding had the best of intentions. However actions speak louder then any words. By SE's swift and decisive response, unfortunately SE's priorities have become clearer.

As an aside I waited over a week, and have read through everything that transpired so I could detail my thoughts with a clear and cool head. There were some tweets, that were very upsetting.

How do we move forward as a community? I do not know. The damage has been done. Regaining trust is a tricky process.

I would start by leveling the playing field between the narrowly focused and the overly broad questions by reducing the number of answers that go into the hotness equation.

Right now of these two types of questions,

1. Narrowly focused with one right well researched answer.

2. Broad question that has many possible answers and everyone gets to weigh in with their opinion but not broad enough to be closed.

Arguably type 1 questions are better but right now the broader questions have a better chance of getting onto the list and staying on it for longer since it has more answers to upvote and therefore gain more hotness points.

Here is one concrete proposal on how to give sites a chance to control the quality of HNQs.

Whenever your automatism detects an HNQ candidate, put it into a dedicated review queue.

• Explain to the reviewers what the purpose of the queue is: polish the candidate and make sure it's representative of the best the site has to offer.
• High-rep users
  • can edit titles, tags, and posts to shine, and then
  • accept or reject the candidate for publication via HNQ.

The votes needed for/against need to be calibrated carefully, of course. Never should a question go "hot" without the approval of the community.

Ideally, all mods and accepting reviewers should get a notification once the question goes hot so they can closely monitor and, if need be, moderate the incoming traffic.

What's in a name?

The Hot network questions cause a problem right from the first word. Why do we care if a question is "hot"? Don't we want "good" or "informative" or "searchable" or anything other than hot questions? A dumpster fire is hot, that doesn't mean that it will draw me over to look at it.

Show Users Good Network Questions (GNQs)

Wouldn't it be better to bring new users to a site via [good], [great], exceptional, or outstanding questions? Or to use more adjectives, maybe [popular], [notable], [famous]? Some of those already have badges that are associated with them. This seems like a very easy way to find the best questions for a site and show them to the outside world. These questions are likely on-topic and show what a site has to offer.

Make a List, Rotate Through It

Use the badges noted above to create a list of possible questions for each site, and then rotate through them. This keeps the same questions from popping up all the time and should be easy from a performance standpoint.

Give each site an equal chance to have a question on the list or base it off of some other metric so that the advertising potential of the GNQs list is spread out.

This gives the sites a chance to make sure that questions are friendly through the natural progression of a site instead of having to jump on the new questions.

While I'm working at my job (which accounts for probably 90%+ of my use of Stack Exchange sites), after probably the 20th+ time that I was distracted from a work task by an interesting link in the Hot Network Questions sidebar, I decided to hide that section of the sidebar, via a change to my client browser.

(Various methods for doing that can be found in answers to this question: How to avoid "Hot Network Questions" on the sidebar)

So, while I'm at work, I personally wouldn't mind at all if the Hot Network Questions just went away -- since that's the situation I've already set up for myself anyway.

When I'm browsing Stack Exchange sites for fun in my free time, I do find the Hot Network questions very interesting, in a good way; however, that use case is of secondary importance for me personally.

Break the feedback loop by ignoring all interactions from the HNQ

If we ignore all interactions coming from people who visited the Q&A from the HNQ, there is no longer any "positive" feedback and people from those communities can more easily regulate if the site is on the HNQ list by not voting at all.

This makes the system still automatic, but prevents a ruh of new people who visit a site in the HNQ making the question more likely to stay inside the list

The general problem

• HNQ needs improving. Let's continue discussing that long term.

The specific problem

• Someone made a public complaint out of context. It is claimed that person does not have a Stack Exchange account.

This makes me ask, why are we showing HNQ in the sidebar to users who are not signed in? Is a significant amount of the benefit HNQ brings coming from such users?

How about only showing HNQ in the sidebar when signed in? Users who are not signed in already see more advertising (which spares signed in users from it). Why not show reasonably non-distracting adverts in the sidebar, and replace them with HNQ when signed in?

This is not a fix for the many other problems that need discussion. It's just one simple suggestion for one simple problem.