What is the difference?

ireadabookonce said:
What is the difference?

Hot seems to be exclusively NSFW; Popular only mostly NSFW.

lonelylupine said:
Hot seems to be exclusively NSFW; Popular only mostly NSFW.

This post was in hot though, and it’s only questionable:
post #3223967

But it could be that Popular is somewhat curated to allow more safe images

ireadabookonce said:
This post was in hot though, and it’s only questionable:
post #3223967

But it could be that Popular is somewhat curated to allow more safe images

If you were caught looking at that image at work, you might be fired, which is why it is called Not Safe For Work.

Popular appears to be the top posts of the day based on score alone, I'm not really sure what Hot is.

Hot orders posts based on how quickly they gained their score.
https://github.com/zwagoth/e621ng/blob/master/app/logical/post_query_builder.rb#L463
relation = relation.order(Arel.sql("log(3, posts.score) + (extract(epoch from posts.created_at) - extract(epoch from timestamp '2005-05-24')) / 35000 DESC"))
Popular just sorts by score, preferring posts which get 100 points over 10 hours compared to posts which get 50 points in 2 hours.

Hot is a response to the Popular page encouraging uploading immediately after midnight to increase the visibility of posts. This was also somewhat addressed by Popular now being tailored to users' set timezone, so there is no longer a single reset period where artists upload their work en masse.

I still prefer Popular overall, though. It's more neatly structured and generally more user-friendly.

https://e621.net/forum_topics/24996

When was the Hot page added?

lonelylupine said:
If you were caught looking at that image at work, you might be fired, which is why it is called Not Safe For Work.

I think I misread NSFW as explicit somehow

songbird said:
This was also somewhat addressed by Popular now being tailored to users' set timezone, so there is no longer a single reset period where artists upload their work en masse.

Not really. The timezone isn't automatically set to user's timezone. It's GMT-5 by default for all users. Given that e6 displays relative time in most places, hardly anyone cares about changing that setting. As a result, the large majority of users use the default timezone anyway, so the Popular page looks the same for them. And you can observe that there's still large amount of uploads shortly after midnight of the default timezone.