Mixed bag. Depends on the instance and even then it’s a post by post in the different communities.

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

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

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

So i sort comments by hot / rising

Not usually tbh, the top comment usually represents the majority opinion which i tend to disagree with

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!

Probably at least 10-15% of the time.

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