It doesn’t matter if the most upvoted comment is pro or against subject in discussion. All that matters is bolstering a comment that is minimally compatible with participant’s thinking and making it win against the opposite argument (competing and most voted one).

So it seems that the most satisfactory comment (for most readers) doesn’t really matter at all. What matters, before anything else, is visibility of an opinion that somewhat aligns with one’s thinking, rather than writing or finding the most corresponding comment for that subject, fully compatible with reader’s perception.

  • sp6@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thankfully Lemmy somewhat negates this with their ranking algorithm. “Hot” is the default for comments and “active” is the default for posts, which according to the Lemmy docs, both “Counterbalance the snowballing effect of votes over time with a logarithmic scale.”

    Basically, if a newer comments gets some upvotes, but still has fewer upvotes than older comments, that new comment will still be shown near the top at first. Then after some time passes, the algorithm slowly shifts to sorting more by “raw” number of votes instead of taking time into account.

    • Neato@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      For me comments tend to look the same as new. Which isn’t bad compared to the oldest toppest.

    • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      The big problem I’ve seen with “Active” as the default post sort is that you occasionally get year old posts suddenly get comment-bombed when someone scrolls too far and upvotes it. Suddenly that year old post is marked as active again, so it’s in everyone’s feed. And most people don’t even bother checking time stamps before commenting, so you suddenly get a flood of comments on your year old post.