When should you use "New" sorting instead of "Best"?

The New sort is the right choice in a specific set of situations where recency and visibility matter more than algorithmic validation. When you are trying to get your own comment or post seen, sorting a subreddit by New is the single most practical strategy available to new users. Because Hot and Best rank by engagement, posts that have already accumulated votes dominate those feeds — new submissions get buried almost immediately in busy communities. Sorting by New means you are seeing posts in the order they arrived, and if you comment on a recently submitted post, your comment has a chance to be among the first visible ones before the thread fills up. New sorting is also essential for time-sensitive monitoring. If you are following a breaking news event and want to see posts the moment they are submitted rather than waiting for them to earn upvotes, New is the only sort that delivers that. Community moderators who monitor their subreddit for rule violations routinely use New so no submission slips past before it gets reviewed. For power users who want to discover niche or underappreciated content, New is valuable because the algorithmic sorts systematically suppress posts that fail to catch fire quickly. A thoughtful, well-researched post submitted at an off-peak time might receive only a handful of upvotes in its first hour and never reach Hot, yet it could be genuinely more valuable than viral meme content. Browsing New exposes you to the full output of a community, not just what the algorithm chose to amplify. As noted in r/NewToReddit advice, new Reddit users are frequently advised to filter by New specifically because many communities have lower or no karma requirements for commenting on posts that have not yet accumulated much activity, and early comments on rising posts have a much higher chance of being upvoted by subsequent readers. In contrast, Best is the right sort when you simply want to consume high-quality, broadly validated content from a community without regard for timing or participation.