Ah, I gotcha.

Each community has the power to restrict the languages used in that community.

I can’t speak to the effectiveness of the system, as I don’t really spend time in non-English communities, but it’s certainly a poorly-documented feature.

It ensures that people who can’t read your post (that is, they have that language deselected in their own account settings) won’t see it.

Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time

Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published

Source

Yeah, it looks like you’re right.

It seems to work for me - it switches all replies to appear as top-level comments, and sorts everything by “Old.”