Difference between HOT and TRENDING tabs made ridiculously simple for newbies and beginners!!

The previous Made ridiculously simple for newbies and beginners post received immense support from the steemit community, which encouraged to make the next post and help out you guys understand steemit better. If you haven't already, please check out the previous post here : https://steemit.com/steemit/@simplifylife/sbd-steem-and-steem-power-made-ridiculously-simple-for-newbies-and-beginners

So today I decided to talk about the tabs you see on top of steemit home page : HOME, NEW, HOT, TRENDING and PROMOTED. all the tabs aren't immediately obvious to newcomers and what they mean. Well, at least HOT and TRENDING is sure to confuse you a bit at first. if it doesn't, you're a Legend!! Take a bow!!

Let's get the easier tabs out of the way first!!

Home is basically the same as you facebook homepage. The posts from people you have followed will show up here. Your posts will show up on the home tab of people who have followed you.

New is exactly what it sounds like. NEW posts!! All new posts that are coming through from the people you've followed will show up here. Similarly, if you navigated to one of the tags, say for example you clicked on the tag memechallenge, and went to the new page, all new posts which has the tag memechallenge in it will be showing up here, the newest one being on the top of the page.

Promoted tab shows posts for which authors have paid money to steemit in SBD and Steemit is promoting their post to it's users!! Simple!!

Hot and Trending are the two tabs that confuses people the most. I haven't found any explanation whatsoever that explains exactly how steemit decides which posts are in trending and which are in hot and I have heard from lot of people who have been around on steemit for a long enough time that even they don't know how this algorithm works.

I'll try to explain from what I figured out. Don't take my word for it as it might not be 100% accurate. This is just how I understand what the differences between these two tabs might be.

Trending tabs shows you the posts which have been doing well for the past few days in certain category. For example, in memechallenge, the trending tab will show the posts with the tag memechallenge which have done well (i.e. got a lot of upvotes, comments and made tons of money) over the last 3-4 days. In the photography category, the trending tab will show posts with photography tag which have done well for the last few days. And so on...

Hot as I understand, are posts that have had good interactions (i.e. upvotes and comments) and earned decent amount of money (the amount might vary between SBD 1 to SBD 50 or more depending on the category the post is in) in relation to time. What I mean by in relation to time is, the quicker your post makes money and gets interaction, the hotter it is and the higher chance you will have to be higher on the *Hot tab. So say for example a post made SBD 3 and had 30 upvotes 5 hours after posting, and a second post which maybe made SBD 2 and had 20 upvotes but all this within 30 minutes of posting, the second post will be higher up than the first post in the hot category beacuse it had higher interaction than the first post in relation to time.

As I understand the list of posts in the hot category are refreshed every 3-4 hours or might even be less or more (no one knows how often) and the list gets updated and newer, hotter posts come up. So unless your post is getting constant interaction and making money constantly, it is very likely your post will move down on the hot list to make way for newer hot posts which are receiving high interaction in relation to time after being posted.

As new comers, it's too big of a dream to be on the trending tab. But getting on the hot tab isn't a dream if you are a little strategic!! I myself have made quite a few of my post appear in the hot tab for a few hours. In fact since I've figured out my strategy, most of my posts (not all) have stayed among the first 5-6 posts on the Hot tab for about 3-4-5 hours!!

This is a big bonus as a new comer as we don't have a lot of followers when we're starting out and the Hot page gives us an opportunity for our posts to be seen by a larger audience, maybe even some of the big guys on steemit, because most people surfing in a certain category checks out the trending and hot posts and thus if you're on top of the hot page there is a high likelihood that you post will be seen by most people surfing the category your post is in.

If this post does similarly well as the previous one, I will make a post titled "Getting your posts HOT made ridiculously simple for newbies and beginners" where I will be discussing My strategy to get on that Hot page!!

I will be trying to use my strategy to get this post on the Hot tab in steemit category. If I succeed I will post a screenshot of that right here :

I'm not being able to add a picture on edit for some reason. But I did make it on to the hot page. But I couldn't reach the top of the page because the competition was way too high!! (the top post made $250 in 30 mins!! No way i'm beating that!!) My post ranked 12 on the hot page for now!!

Hope this post helped. Start Upvoting to increase your Curation Rewards. Resteem this post and maybe more people out there might be benefited.

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