Good point. On my computer, posts are listed in order of when they were first posted, and they can’t be “bumped.” Perhaps there’s a profile setting that can change that.
Clicking on the “comments” tab gives you the same list as the “latest posts” section except you can click on the link to go straight to the original post (unlike with the latest posts section ; when you click on a link there it takes you to the latest post in that thread).
The “activity” tab seems to be defunct now (at least for me). It never works.
The News/Activism section does get the most attention I believe. It seems most like to browse it exclusively to filter out the other forums. The reason a lot of Beaking News threads don’t get a lot of replies is because they are already in the sidebar, so there is little reason to “bump” them to keep the thread visible to others.
Chat threads are another matter. They may or may not get a lot of replies. It seems the ones that do are ones about internal FR matters, ones about guns, dogs (especially pitbulls) , cruelty to any animals, and moose and ones about the civil war. Other chats tend to die rather quickly.