What sorts and filters are available on posts (Best, Hot, New, Top, Rising, Controversial)?

Reddit provides several sorting options that fundamentally change which posts you see at the top of any feed or community. Each sort uses a different formula, and choosing the right one depends entirely on what you are trying to accomplish at a given moment. **Hot** is the default sort for most communities and prioritizes posts that are accumulating upvotes and comments quickly. It applies a time-decay function, meaning a post from yesterday cannot outrank a post from today even if the older post eventually gathered more total votes. Hot essentially surfaces the most engaging content from roughly the past 24 to 48 hours. **Best** is a more opaque, personalized sort used primarily on the Home feed. According to discussions on r/TheoryOfReddit, Best uses a more complex formula than Hot and incorporates signals beyond raw votes — it is less dominated by only the largest communities and is more likely to surface posts from smaller subreddits if they achieve strong relative engagement. Best also applies less emphasis on pure recency compared to Hot. **New** shows posts in strict reverse-chronological order, with the most recently submitted post at the top. There is no algorithmic weighting at all — every submission appears in the order it was posted. **Top** ranks posts by their total net upvote score and requires you to choose a time window: past hour, past day, past week, past month, past year, or all time. It is the definitive way to find the highest-voted content in a community's history. **Rising** surfaces posts that are gaining rapid engagement but have not yet reached Hot status. According to community explanations on r/help, Rising tends to show posts that are less than a few hours old and experiencing accelerating activity — it is a useful early-detection tool for content that is about to go viral. **Controversial** highlights posts that have accumulated both large numbers of upvotes and large numbers of downvotes simultaneously. The algorithm identifies posts where the community is deeply split rather than uniformly supportive.