I haven't seen a thread on this in a while. I have been going with top day for a while, but it can be hit or miss. Other sorts don't seem to display as good in terms of balancing quality and quantity. What is your preferred sort for your main feed?
Edit: Realizing that the people who sort new commented before the hot/top/active people, haha
Been sorting new all my life on reddit and I've been using Boost forever so now I use Boost and sort by new. I enjoy not seeing the same shit over and over.
All, Top for the past 6 hours. Sometimes in the morning I’ll switch it to 12 hours to see what I missed overnight and other times the week just to make sure. But I don’t subscribe to anything, give me all the best of Lemmy
Honestly, sorting algos are serious nerd shit. They're for suckers and losers. If it's not worth doing, insertion sort every day of the week. Compute is cheap. If it's actually important, then it's TimSort (it's never important).
In small datasets, the speed difference is minimal; but, once you get to large datasets with hundreds of thousands to millions of entries they do make quite a difference. For example, you're a large bank with millions of clients, and you want to get a list of the people with the most money in an account. Depending on the sorting algorithm used, the processing time could range from seconds to days. That's also only one operation, there's so much other useful information that could be derived from a database like that using sorting.
I used to use "top 24h" but these days I just sort by "hot" because it actually seems to work pretty well now: I don't see the total garbage that gets down voted immediately like you get with "new" but I see pretty much everything else (which is what I like; I especially like finding interesting posts in obscure communities!).
I also regularly block foreign language communities for no other reason than I can't read them so there's no point in them taking up space in my feed. Like, I'm sure that German meme about Elon Musk is hilarious but since I don't know German it's just noise 🤷
All, new. It keeps things fresh throughout my workday. I spend most of it on my own, and have a lot of points of 2-5 minute downtime. I end up sitting in the back office and browsing Lemmy pretty often.
I'm pretty much always set to all, with hot being good for me most of the time. New and scaled are also nice ways to get some extra variety on slow days. I'll rarely use active and top if I've been away for a while
I do Active All by default, see what's popping. After i exhaust that I go by all Hot. I have a lot of communities filtered (mainly porn ones) to clean up my feed even though I also am subscribed to several communities. Lemmy is still small enough where I don't feel I need to only see my subs.
Active in my subbed communities and hide read posts, that usually gives me a similar experience that I had with Reddit (and using Boost or Sync for Reddit sometimes makes me forget where I am lol).
Sometimes I sort it to the top 6, 12 or 24 hours though.
Scaled is the default account sort as I find it the best when I am browsing Lemmy on a PC/Lap (which that would be like 1% of my total Lemmy usage, just like Reddit lol).
Default sort? I just set mine to 'New' to keep up with the one guy who posts a thousand news articles per minute. The rest of the users are either trolls or the braindead few who haven't realized they're the last ones left in this digital wasteland. It's like watching the end of the internet in slow motion.
Subscribed | Scaled. But I sometimes change it to Subscribed | Top 12h for new content (but not too new that there's no discussion yet) or even All | Top Day if I want more.
Occasionally you’ll click on an article or photo and there’s a really important explanation or disclaimer as the most-upvoted comment, but you’ll only see that first if you sort by top.