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.
sp6@lemmy.world 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.
Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Neato@kbin.social 1 year ago
For me comments tend to look the same as new. Which isn't bad compared to the oldest toppest.