I don’t think it does. I just looked a sample thread sorted by “hot”. I think that just sorts by the number of upvotes.

I like New comments

I use “Hot”, it’s nice.

Personally I do Subscribed + Scaled. Scaled surfaces new stuff from smaller communities with fewer votes. Subscribed ensures it doesn’t bring in too much noise. I keep a large Subscribed list with many communities I’m interested in hearing about, but don’t necessarily check regularly.

I also regularly switch to All + Top Day / Scaled / Hot / etc. to see what’s going on that isn’t in my Sub list. If I see something I’d like to see regularly, I subscribe.

New - for subscribed feeds

Top last 6 hours - for All

All. Because someone has to give the initial down votes on spam posts.

Top counts Net votes.

I like Hot, but if I haven’t been on for a bit then I check Top [timeframe since I last checked]

Subscribed - Hot is my default

All - Hot is my alternate if I’m seeing the same recentish posts too much

All - New if I’m looking around for new communities to subscribe to

Top doesn’t do anything for me because needing to narrow down by time frame is too many steps, although I didn’t check to see if there is a setting tonchange the default

Top 6 hours is best

I switched to “new comments” and don’t want to go back to anything else. It has only advantages in my mind:

• It gives me a mix of older and very new threads (because new posting also counts as a comment).
• It makes sure different threads are shown to me after a short period of time already, making sure I do not get bored by seeing only things I’ve already seen.
• It reminds me of web forums with thread bumping, which I continue to think were one of the best ways to organize online discussions we’ve ever had.
• It still shows me more upvoted stuff more of the time because many other users sort by sorting methods that take upvotes into account, so such threads also get more comments usually.

One disadvantage is that occasionally I get several-month-old (or even year-old) threads at the top of my feed if someone has the brilliant idea to post in them. Doesn’t happen very much though.

Scaled and subscribed. There’s a lot of other languages and other topics that I don’t know much about on All. I’m sure that they’re useful, but I don’t understand it and I can’t meaningfully contribute to it. Subscribed is more curated and therefore more meaningful to me. The key is to be lax with what you subscribe to. Seek out niche communities, and subscribe to communities that may not perfectly fit your interests - you want to diversify your feed, so subscribe to basically everything that you’d be ok with seeing.

Then, sort by Scaled. Hot has a tendency of pushing all the big communities to the top and burying the smaller communities, so you’ll just get a ton of news articles in your feed. Scaled will normalize for community size and make for a more diverse feed

I like looking at my subscriptions and sorting by Hot which is newer than Top