I'm a bit baffled - I love the active sort so far. Sure, it's different from reddit, but in a good way. It means the exact timing of a post, to line up perfectly with the peak active hours of U.S. users, or similar, isn't critical anymore, because a post can go relatively ignored for a day or two and then get picked up and filled with comments and discussion.

It gives people more time to get around to reading a long linked article or watching a linked long video first, before commenting, too, while still leaving them able to participate in discussion after.

It means that people who comment "late" still get replies. Commenting even slightly late on reddit and not getting any replies or votes felt awful, like you were talking to a wall. And the people who sorted by new and commented first tended to stick to the top of threads because they accumulated more upvotes by sheer force of time.

I hope we can avoid re-creating the constant, over-hurried content-churn of reddit, and keep this more patient feel.

That said, I'll concede that active search is best for discussion posts, like on Chat or Gaming (e.g. threads that ask people to share favorite xyz games and so on), or those based around longread articles, and not necessarily as good for Breaking News. But even then... I think it does us good to allow time to discuss news posts, too, and active search does that.

Tldr I use active search as default for everything and I absolutely love it like this, please don't get rid of it just to make the site more like reddit.