Reddit is not one feed. Each subreddit has its own New pile, and several sorts on top of it. Understanding those sorts is enough. You do not need a fake equation.
The sorts that matter
| Sort | What it is |
|---|---|
| New | Chronological. This is the only place a brand-new post exists. |
| Hot | Recent posts with strong vote-and-comment velocity. Default view for most people. |
| Rising | Posts that are accelerating. Useful if you are hunting threads to comment in. |
| Top | Highest score in a time window. Hour, day, week, month, year, all-time. |
| Best / comments | Comment ranking is its own sort. Early, well-received replies stay on top. |
Home feeds and r/popular pull from Hot across communities you subscribe to, or across the site. You do not submit to r/all. You submit to a subreddit and hope the post is Hot enough to travel.
Signals, without the fan fiction
Reddit has said, over years of announcements and mod docs, that it looks at votes, how new the post is, how the vote ratio looks, and whether people are talking. It also tries to down-rank spam and vote brigades. It has not published weights, and those weights change.
- Velocity. Votes per unit time after submit. This is why the first hour is the product.
- Ratio. A contested post is weaker than a smaller post people actually like.
- Comments. Discussion is a quality signal. Empty score-only threads fade.
- Subreddit scale. 30 votes is a banger in a 8,000-person room and nothing in a default.
- Account trust. New accounts and burst voters get less benefit. Karma on the author is not a Hot boost; it is mostly an AutoMod ticket.
Moderators sit above all of this. A removed post has rank zero, whatever the score was. Check the rules and AutoMod before you write.
What to actually do
- Title for the room, not for Google.
- Post when that room is in New — measure it.
- Reply to every early comment.
- Do not spam the same link across ten subs.
Votes can keep a decent post in the race. They cannot outrank a removal. If you use them, order a paced quantity and stay in the thread.
Questions
Does Reddit use one algorithm for every subreddit?
The same sorts exist everywhere — New, Hot, Rising, Top, Best — but each community has different traffic and moderators. What it takes to stay on Hot in r/AskReddit is nothing like a 20k niche room.
Are all upvotes weighted equally?
Reddit has said votes from established accounts are harder to fake and that it discounts suspicious bursts. It does not publish weights. Assume a pile of new accounts is weaker than a paced set of aged ones, and assume nothing is guaranteed.
Can a post recover after a slow start?
Rarely. Hot is a race against time. If the first two hours are dead, write the next post instead of waiting on the old one.