Comment by NegativeK

Excepting small communities: if you're looking for anything but humor, sort by best typically ruins the comments.

Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.

PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.

Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.