What I mean is someone sets up a new community, blasts it with a bunch of content to get things started, or sets up a new community bot that makes 20 posts and every other post in my feed is that community. Usually with 1 or 2 votes each and no comments. No matter what way I sort I see this.
I have zero issues with people getting things going within their space, and it’s not a knock against new communities that don’t want to be empty when people stumble across them.
It’s a complaint about the algorithm flooding my feed with so much content from one place that I’ve unfortunately blocked communities over this that I otherwise would have continued to run across and maybe engaged with in the future.
I’m not sure if your first X results should all be unique communities or putting some sort of engagement threshold in place before they show up in the top X posts or something. I don’t really have a perfect answer but to me this is a flaw in the system.
I have found sorting by “active” to be the best sort order. It seems to be mostly immune to concentrated clumps, though it is very slow changing.
I also sort by active.
I deal with the slow changing feed by hiding read posts, that way I always have a “fresh” feed.