Glossary
Karma — The signed sum of the weights that an account's posts and comments have received. Stored on-chain in PostRegistry.karmaOf. Unit: points, 100 points = 1 vote.
Weight — How much a vote is worth, derived from the karma of the voter. 0–200; 100 is a full vote. Function weightOf.
Point — The smallest unit. 100 points = 1 vote. Solidity has no decimals, so the system uses points to be able to say "0.01 votes".
Vote — A single like or dislike, carrying the weight of the person casting it.
Raw count — likeCount / dislikeCount: counts people, one each, ignoring reputation. For display only.
Weighted count — weightedLikes / weightedDislikes: the sum of weights. This is what algorithms and karma use.
Candidate — The set of post ids the indexer hands to the ranking contract. The selection of this set happens off-chain.
Strategy — How the indexer selects candidates: recent, popular, trending, community, joined.
Slot — A "compartment" in AlgorithmRegistry holding one algorithm. SLOT_FEED = 0 (main feed), SLOT_EXPLORE = 1.
Algorithm — A contract implementing IFeedAlgorithm, taking (viewer, candidateIds) and returning an order with scores.
Epoch — The time anchor Hot uses as the base for a post's age term. Equal to the deploy time of HotFeed.
Wilson — The confidence-interval formula in the Best algorithm. Uses z = 1.2815… (80% confidence), the same as Reddit.
Balance / Magnitude — Two quantities of Controversial: balance is how evenly likes and dislikes are split, magnitude is the total number of votes.
Handle — Display name: bytes32, 3–21 characters a–z0–9_, held by IdentityRegistry. Can be changed, and the old name is released.
Passkey — A WebAuthn key on the device. This is the account; there is no password.
Gate — The testnet access-limiting mechanism: an invite code sets a signed cookie; the edge function and API verify it with a shared secret.
Indexer — The off-chain service that reads logs into SQLite, returns post content, and selects candidates. It is a cache, not the source of truth.
Reply — A post with a non-zero parentId. Only the direct parent is stored; comments are never ranked.
IPFS / CID — The chain stores only ipfs://<cid>, not a URL. A gateway showing images is the client's decision.