About[]
The Hot List displays the community's most popular programs on Khan Academy.
It currently displays the top forty programs and displays forty more for every time you press the "More" button.
The Hot List.
How[]
How to get on the hot list:
- Have a program that gets a lot of votes in a small amount of time.
- Have a program that gets a lot of spin-offs by different users in a small amount of time.
Importance[]
Importance of the hot list:
- It gives users an extra incentive to spend more time on a single program.
- Allows programs to be seen by everybody and allows them to get votes and spin-offs.
- Helps people get "noticed" on Khan Academy.
- Can help users earn badges, avatars, and energy points.
Removed Programs[]
Programs can be removed from the hot list for many reasons:
- Soliciting Votes (Requesting Votes, Making promises for votes, receiving votes from a voting ring)
- Plagiarism (Not a spin-off and not giving credit to the original author)
- Abuse (Disrespectful or Offensive )
- Using Disallowed Functionality (Accessing Externals or the DOM)
- Off Topic (Petitions to change the site)
Once a program receives three flags for any one of the above reasons, it is removed from the hot list.
All of the flagging reasons can be seen in the new program guidelines:
Badges and Avatars[]
The following badges and avatars can be earned from the hot list:
- 1000 Kelvin (Have a red-hot program at the top of the Community Programs list)
- Cool Hopper (One of your programs hits the top of the Hot list)
Spin-offs[]
Prior to 2014, spin-offs were allowed on the hot list.
- This was not efficient, as many spin-offs were getting on the hot list even though they didn't change anything from the original programs. Many of the spin-offs got over five hundred votes even though they didn't change at all. This caused many problems and conflicts between users and even the moderators of Khan Academy.
As of 2014 and beyond, spin-offs can not get on the hot list.
- To fix the 2013 problem, Khan Academy made it so spin-offs could not get on the hot list. This seemed good at first, but then escalated to an even worse situation. People often plagiarize programs now to get on the hot list and don't even give any credit to the original creators. Even more conflicts are occurring now.
As of 2016, it seems spin-offs can get on the hot list, but there is some sort of algorithm to distinguish between spin-offs with or without significant enough changes.
Future:
- Khan Academy is still trying to find a way to fix these conflicts in a new efficient way. Uh-oh.