I used to use this feature on reddit all the time and it made sorting gold from crap significantly easier.
Instead of having to look through literally hundreds of pages of new material bloated with low quality content we could have an algorithm sort through materials by tags and place them under the rising tab based on the rate of upvotes compared to the norm for those tags.
So how it would work is like this:
Post metrics: 20 upvotes in 2 hours
| tags | avg. upvote rate/4hr | (post upvotes/time since post)/(avg. upvote rate) |
|---|---|---|
| politics | 5 | (20/2)/5 = 2 |
| buttzex | 0 | 10/0 = inf* |
| tangerines | 2 | 10/2 = 5 |
| steemit | 4 | 10/4 = 2.5 |
Then all the posts under the rising tab for any tag are arranged by their upvote rate quotient in the last column.
The math is laughably simple and it would make it more likely for posts that really deserve upvotes to get in the spotlight.