Many times the top upvoted comment is just one of, if not the first comment.
So i sort comments by hot / rising
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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I'm not sure but I will say it's nice how often the top comments are pretty reasonable on here.
I see waaaay too many doomer/surrender-in-advance type comments around here at the top.
nevar.
Upvotes/downvotes shouldn't reflect how much you agree with the content. It should be a metric for whether it adds something of value to the fediverse.
Otherwise, default sort would just be an echo chamber.
Is agreement and humor not a value? I, myself, put a lot of value into whoever can make me laugh in this day and age... And location. Hell, even getting me to slightly let air out of my nose is massively appreciated these days.
I vote for visibility.
I agree with your highest upvoted comment
It was supposed to be that way on Reddit too, but everyone just treated them like like/dislike buttons instead.
That could be its own interesting question too; I imagine pragmatic case-use will differ with a significant portion of the userbase treating them as likes/dislikes.
I used to default to relying on the top comments, but especially with platforms like Reddit having shills and other types of conversation dominating trolls, I try to scroll through the comments. It's a lot easier to do on Lemmy.
Not usually tbh, the top comment usually represents the majority opinion which i tend to disagree with
Depends on the community. Some it's quite often, and others it's not. I do like to hear variety in people's thinking
Quite often, actually. It's pretty comfy in here!
Mixed bag. Depends on the instance and even then it's a post by post in the different communities.
Probably at least 10-15% of the time.
Probably about 2/3rds of the time I most agree with the top comment.
For the record, this post was not one of those times
Obviously dependent on the number of comments, let's call that n. Maybe as often as n^-0.6^ in unemotional topics, and closer to n^-1.5^ for politics and current events. Comment score is a better predictor of comment age than comment quality.
At 9 comments in 2 hours, it's already false in this thread.