Even Lemmy was like this. Especially with the default comment sort “active”, which promotes comments that lead to arguments. My experience has been better since I switched to “top”.

I still haven’t found a good post sort that works for me. “Hot” and “Scaled” literally only promote stuff posted in the past two hours. “Top” is kinda sad because you always see posts 1 day old, and “Active” has the negative engagement problem.

The best solution I’ve found is be on an instance with downvotes disabled and sort by “active” but it isn’t perfect.