I forgot to mention another strategy I use for mitigating the need to scan through multiple child pages of comments: I figure out which comment the big discussion is in response to, and click "permalink," then I keep refreshing this page and scanning through it. Doing so mitigates the number of comments I need to scan, but it has a few drawbacks:

• I will miss replies to other comments in the original thread that might be interesting, which are at the same level of the comment I am re-examining
• Multiple comments at the same level are the parents of discussions I want to follow; to scan through the permalinks of both costs multiple page views
• Sometimes even if I hit a permalink to a comment that sparked a discussion and exclude a lot of the comments, there are still so many comments, falling into so many "continue" child branches that I must do 3-4 page scans to find the new responses to a single comment in a single thread