I'm not sure but I will say it's nice how often the top comments are pretty reasonable on here.

Many times the top upvoted comment is just one of, if not the first comment.

So i sort comments by hot / rising

I see waaaay too many doomer/surrender-in-advance type comments around here at the top.

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.

Quite often, actually. It's pretty comfy in here!

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.

Depends on the community. Some it's quite often, and others it's not. I do like to hear variety in people's thinking

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.

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.

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