Algorithm is just a fancy word for rules to sort by. “New” is an algorithm that says “sort by the timestamp of the submissions”. That one is pretty innocuous, I think. Likewise “Active” which just says “sort by the last time someone commented” (or whatever). “Hot” and “Scaled”, though, involve business logic – rules that don’t have one technically correct solution, but involve decisions and preferences made by people to accomplish a certain aim. Again in Lemmy’s case I don’t think either the “Hot” or “Scaled” algorithms should be too controversial – and if they are, you can review the source code, make comments or a PR for changes, or stand up your own Lemmy instance that does it the way you want to. For walled-garden SM sites like TikTok, Facebook and Twitter/X, though, we don’t know what the logic behind the algorithm says. We can speculate that it’s optimized to keep people using the service for longer, or encouraging them to come back more frequently, but for all intents and purposes those algorithms are black boxes and we have to assume that they’re working only for the benefits of the companies, and not the users.
It’s more like “I don’t have any money for you. What? This? Oh, this hoard technically belongs to the dragon that I have subjugated and keep in my dungeon. He lends me coin as I need it, and I will pay him back when I’m dead”