There is a timing factor that you need to consider, too. Anecdotally, Sunday morning is the best time to get onto the front page, while Tuesday or Wednesday morning gets you the most views.
Yep, that's why I included the post date in the information available to the model; in theory (if it's smart enough) it should be able to take that into account. That said I didn't include time-of-day; it would be interesting to see whether adding that information would be able to make the model more accurate!
If the reward model is indeed smart enough to be able to take that into account you could actually use it to plan the optimal time of day to post a specific story! You could just use the reward model to compute a predicted score for 8 different versions of your content, holding the post title/text constant across them all and just changing the date. Based on the differences in scores, you can determine which posting time the RM thinks is most likely to make your post successful!
>you could actually use it to plan the optimal time of day to post a specific story!
You see this on Reddit pretty commonly.
Someone posts original content at an off time and get a small/moderate amount of upvotes. Then some time later (could be hours, days, or weeks) a bot/karma account will post the content at an optimal time to farm upvotes.
