

If you’re accommodating another group of people you should produce enough to always feed them, too, not just sometimes in surplus years. The whole point is that you’ve gotta plan for a surplus, otherwise you risk starvation in bad years (and it doesn’t make it any better, morally, if the people who bear the risk of starving are “another group or people”).
I disagree with you. I’d never want to go back to the old defaults in forums, of un-threaded conversations where every comment is equal (and generally sorted by timestamp). Some comments are just better than others, and a user interface should prioritize the better comments.
Comments that are interesting, funny, or informative can be read by more people when they’re shown earlier in the page.
Comments that are rude, factually incorrect, off topic, etc., can be de-emphasized in the user interface, even if they don’t technically break any rules. I’d rather it be a community driven decision than a mod-driven decision of the harsh consequences of comment removal or user ban.
The key is to find a community whose collective opinions you respect. Crowds may not be perfect, but they’re generally better than individual mods.
And a naive “newest first” sort algorithm just prioritizes frequent posters and incentivizes “bumping” threads, which also detracts from the overall quality of a forum.