It's one of those things that doesn't matter until everyone does it. The behavior of many Reddit users is based on the "popular" or "hot" order, and it truly do

It's one of those things that doesn't matter until everyone does it. The behavior of many Reddit users is based on the "popular" or "hot" order, and it truly does make a difference in the style of their conversation. GitHub Issues is another odd example. They sort by "newest thread", which I've never seen any other service use by default. It makes long difficult issues/proposals end sooner than they should, because a comment someone makes 2 seconds ago is still buried on page 12. It doesn't matter than I set the sorting mode to "most recent comment" because other people don't do it as well. Discourse is a fantastic example of a good community platform. You can "star" a post to give your appreciation, but that doesn't give your post any visibility boost by default. It treats all comments equal, as they should, and gives threads attention that is linearly proportional to the number of comments, which is how discussions/subjects work in real life.