I have a suggestion: recent comments for threads.

Once the comments to a post get big and grow into many trees (which get split off onto other "continue this thread..." pages), it becomes very hard to follow and find new replies to those threads.

Manually scanning through all the branches in the tree is time-consuming, and it can be easy to miss one or two new posts. Sometimes I find myself using the recent comments page, but then I have to scan through comments in other discussions that I'm not so interested in. Another technique I've tried is watching the comments page of the prolific posters in the discussion I am following, but that also gets time-consuming, and will lead me to miss comments from other people in the discussion.

Does anyone else find this a problem? Any solutions within the current features of the site? If not, is there anything that can be done to make this easier to follow?

The best thing I can think of would be a "recent comments" page for each individual post. It would basically be another "Sort By" of the comments that would take them out of their tree structure, and put them in a flat view ordered by recentness.