One of mine is on the 3rd with 9 upvotes. Awhile back a meme with 9 upvotes would be on like the 12th page. That's weird!

number of points / (image age)^2

^ That's essentially the formula that governs the hot pages, similar to many other websites that rank by recency and upvotes. We have various tweaks to this, e.g. upvotes/downvotes/comments/views may all have certain contributions (upvotes matter the most), but the formula operates generally the same way.

so if I decide to eventually submit a meme that I generated a month ago it will be too outaged to ever make the hot page?

No, image age in imgflip's hotness formula is computed using submission date rather than creation date

ok - thx.
some images stay in submisson loop for almost a day though - better be changed to featuring date rather than submission date then.

you can allow for a slower feature or slower fading out btw by adding an offset:
number of points / (image age + offset )^2

but probably there's an offset anyway otherwise formula would produce an DIVISION BY ZERO error given an age of 0 days.

It does indeed use the time the submission was featured, not when the author clicked "submit". Image age should be the amount of time the image was viewable and upvoteable.

You've been called.

imgflip.com/i/303jl4?nerp=1556997816#com3220695

I can only think there is less being submitted, fewer people to upvote and in turn a lower volume of upvotes needed to move up to the front pages.
I remember having a couple when I first joined getting 20-25 upvotes and not even being close to page 2.

I've also had a meme only get 15 upvotes in 24 hours and still make the FrontPage, hours later and it ended up getting 180+ upvotes! I guess enough people saw it in a short amount of time to give it a good boost

Check this box circled in the image. You're probably following all of your "followed streams." It's the default on the hot pages. If you change it to just "fun" you'll get the actual hot pages in the fun stream.

I actually had it on fun when I saw those memes, but today I don't see anything like that.. Maybe there was a glitch in the system

It is glitch week.....I think?

Glitch week ended yesterday I should have submitted it then! Oh well lol

https://i.imgflip.com/2yh1lr.jpg 😎🤣😜😉

Thanks😉☺

its about views

Also check how old some memes with more upvotes are. I believe this also plays a role.

I think these were 9 hours old.

Well to get 20 upvotes in only a few hours is "hotter" than 100 upvotes over an entire year, don't you think? And indeed mixed channels can play a role, as when channels are mixed I could see some memes getting higher ranked because that channel was less often visited in general. I wonder if the poster's rank also plays a role or not. Let's say I work as a moderator for Game Jolt and I often get this question about the games posted there as well, but you already guessed it, I'm not allowed to reveal about the formulas there, but I can't rule out some secrets things play a role here as well.

I agree! I'm definitely not complaining I just thought it was odd

Streams?

I hope it's a balancing of the system to weigh recent posts a bit higher than cumulative upvotes. That would help new posts get seen by more people.

Yeah, I have a meme on the 2nd page with only 12 upvotes right now.