The algorithm is more complicated than that. I don’t recall the exact details, but I’m pretty sure it includes the rate of upvotes, not just the number of them. And while it can be overriden by moderators, I doubt that they’re doing that very often.
I just checked, and there is in fact no such auto-promote feature in the code base. I was misremembering a post in which Eliezer talked about it being planned, but apparently it never happened.
Eliezer promotes posts by hand. If he likes them and they have a reasonable number of upvotes, they go up faster. If he doesn’t like them, they need more votes before he’ll promote them. If he doesn’t see them for a while, they’ll take longer to be promoted.
The algorithm is more complicated than that. I don’t recall the exact details, but I’m pretty sure it includes the rate of upvotes, not just the number of them. And while it can be overriden by moderators, I doubt that they’re doing that very often.
I just checked, and there is in fact no such auto-promote feature in the code base. I was misremembering a post in which Eliezer talked about it being planned, but apparently it never happened.
Eliezer promotes posts by hand. If he likes them and they have a reasonable number of upvotes, they go up faster. If he doesn’t like them, they need more votes before he’ll promote them. If he doesn’t see them for a while, they’ll take longer to be promoted.
That’s exactly what I thought. (And I assume your source for this information is Eliezer, making it very likely to be correct!)
I didn’t realize promotion was automated; I thought editors (meaning basically EY) did it manually.
The algorithm really ought to be public.
If there is such an algorithm in the codebase that’s published on github, it shouldn’t be too hard to find.