I believe “active” sort has comments bump put an entire post, which has many threads inside it. Not sure if time factors into it. The “hot” algo is slightly more complicated that factors in votes and then time will heavily decrease it from appearing on the front page. Both algos punish smaller communities as they’re not going to be as active or have nearly as much votes.
Think you just described crypto markets, and it’d be overrun with scams, fraud, legal issues, and zero accountability. Also my payment info and shipping address is the very last thing I want given to random decentralized instances ran by unknown people. No thanks.
At least when Amazon sends something shitty, they’ll fight back against the seller and you’re actually receiving something. Also big tech is significantly less likely to ever expose your personal information (addresses, payment info, etc) then some random instance owner.
So this is absolutely a terrible idea in a digital environment.