The hotness algorithm is a tradeoff. If we increase the time exponent (or limit things to 1 day), then there would be many more low rated images on the hot pages, and the highest rated ones would be very hard to find after a day.
The idea right now is that you browse "hot" if you just want a quick look at the best stuff in the past ~1-3 days, but if you want to see more diversity and not all the same highly rated stuff, then you browse "latest" instead. We wouldn't know what's hot unless there were people browsing "latest"!
There could certainly be a change to the hot/latest setup, but we'll want to find a way to achieve the best of both worlds if we make significant changes.
