I mostly stay on New and block all the magazines whose content I have 0 interest in, just to keep the amount of refreshing I need to do down. I'll occasionally switch over to Hot to see what the hivemind is interested in, but yeah otherwise it's far too slow.
I agree that Hot and Active don't seem to give enough weight to time. The same handful of threads have been on the front page of both for me for a couple days. I'm probably going to stick with New for now.