This feature request is a follow-up to How is decreasing hotness score of successive questions from same site by 2% supposed to work?
As was pointed out in the above question, currently this adjustment fails to make any reasonable impact (neither positive nor negative).
hotness score of successive questions from same site is penalised by 2%. Taking into account that there could be no more than 5 questions from the same site this means that maximum possible penalty is 8%... it looks too small... closer look at sample distribution of scores suggests that... even if system allowed 10-20 questions from same site like it did before, the effect of penalty would be negligible...
The answer there explains how it used to work initially and how it was eventually broken many years ago.
it was established really long time ago... Back then, the UI displaying hot questions was totally different - there was rather small scrollable dropdown... This whole thing broke badly right after hot questions moved to sidebar because there was no scrolling involved anymore and soon after that randomizing buried it completely because order in the list didn't matter anymore...
Assuming that the above analysis is correct, I think we’d better do something about this confusing and useless tweak.
Specifically, I propose to increase the value of this parameter to make it resemble the initially intended effect. I think it has to change to at least 10% instead of current 2%, or maybe even to 20-30% (in latter case penalising would probably better change to geometric progression instead of current arithmetic).
Alternatively — given the fact that, over many years, the system has proven to work just fine without it — we could just remove this parameter and simplify things to make it easier to understand and manage how the system works. This thing was essentially disabled for over six years and the sky didn't fall. I think this means it is safe to completely get rid of it.
