Honestly, same. I decided to start sorting by old, and i find a lot of fun in following the tone of the discussion.

ironically–and probably under the influence of reddit, where this has become completely gamed–i can’t stand this style of information sorting. i think it really only works if you have people mashing inputs for it with good faith and good understanding; otherwise, it descends into muck eventually. i do much better with either forums or real-time chats, probably because i go in with no expectations of what’s good or bad having already been sorted for me

On reddit, I used a userscript to hide upvotes/downvotes just to avoid that gamification. It made my experience much better because, like you said, I went in without expectations and forced myself to read and reflect on the content (both comments and posts) instead of having them presented to me as being good or bad.

I'm glad beehaw has, at least, the number of upvotes/downvotes on comments hidden by default.

probably under the influence of reddit, where this has become completely gamed–i can’t stand this style of information sorting.

I've actually noticed myself doing this by instinct as in the last few months I mostly read Reddit comments sorted chronologically. Part of that is because of the hivemind problem in certain subs, which frankly is even less tolerable the more trivial a subject is, as in, for example, subs for fans of a certain artist where other users jump to downvote people who dare say that not every thing the artist does is perfect. And what's even the point in discussing things if everything is "how good this is", "how amazing this is", etc.?