I do do this. Whenever I discover a new community with interesting (unique) content, I'll scroll through the back catalogue. I just don't comment on it; there's no point in trying to comment on a year-old post. It's got to be a community with unique content or a specific theme, though. I'm not going to scroll through generic news posts from a year ago, but I will scroll through old memes or something like Not The Onion.

I'm here for the interaction combined with the learning.

Comments on old posts don't get much interaction.

Maybe repost the oldies and get a convo going.

they missed the old days of ~10 new posts a day.

why don't they just go look back through it for their enjoyment?

I don't see how you've drawn the conclusion that people haven't already done this, and want new content to go through. The fediverse is small enough that you can usually comb through an entire community's backlog in a couple days, if not hours. When the backlog is empty, they're going to wish they had more content.

It's like recommending someone just go watch the older seasons of a long running show they liked that ended, sure there's probably a number of people that haven't seen the first season or two but a lot of people have already seen it and watching the same show on repeat is not the same as a new episode every week.

A lot of us do go browse and read older content — but there is a bit of stigma about commenting on older posts.

Old content? Wait til you hear about these things called books.

It's easier to not doom scroll on Lemmy in general. Lots of real people who are just less angry.

I think it's for different moods. When discovering a new community, I can spend a couple hours looking through several pages' worth of of All Time Top posts, but for daily quick visits I just look at 1-2 pages of the Hot feed of my subscribed communities. If something doesn't make it there, I'll likely miss it. (I occasionally venture over to the Scaled feed too.)

I don't think I ever looked through a community's entire back catalogue though. Though tbf I did most of my deep diving on reddit, where it just wasn't practical with the volume of posts (also like 10+ pages in it often started to feel like I was down to the dregs in quality). But it may be more practical on Lemmy/PieFed.

I think it is how our brains were trained.
These sites - do not help with older content. This is a perfect example to an other post about how Internet used to have spaces.
Lemmy isn't designed for long term - "let's go back" content. Not even WordPress is.
Tho over there you can have tags and groups for articles so you can read it more easily.
At this point probably a wikia-type site would work better for readingbolder posts, but obviously not good for engagement and convos.