I used to subscribe to front page posts RSS feed but gave up on it years ago because the signal-to-noise ratio went too low. Now I subscribe to user RSS feeds of a handful of old-timer users who seem to consistently have interesting things to say and then learn about posts they interact with. https://www.greaterwrong.com/ all the way.
RSS here too. I scroll past a bunch of them, but find gems and I comment where I have something to say.
I use the RSS feed and if it looks interesting I either give a fast look and decide if I read it or not and/or I save those that seem interesting and come back a few hours/days later to see the community reaction and decide then.
Oh, I just recalled the existence of GreaterWrong, an alternative frontend for LessWrong, that includes a recent comments section that might give you what you want: https://www.greaterwrong.com/recentcomments
Yeah, I also use GW, and the recent comments firehose is part of the reason. Very old LW also had it and I loved it then too.
(Another pet complaint of mine is that comment permalinks on current LW work in a very weird way. They show the linked comment at the top of the page, then the post, then the rest of the comments, including a second copy of the linked comment. I don't know what design process led to this, but even after all these years it throws me off every time. Reddit and HN also get it wrong, but less wrong than LW: they show the comment and its subthread, but not the surrounding context. GW is the only one that gets it right: it links to the entire comment page, and jumps to the comment in question.)
Reddit and HN also get it wrong, but less wrong than LW: they show the comment and its subthread, but not the surrounding context.
You can click on the "context" link in a HN subthread view to switch to the one you want.
My method of reading Less Wrong is to scroll back through all recent comments and posts, which the front page spontaneously presents to me in reverse-chronological order, until I arrive at posts and comments that I recognize. Along the way, if I see anything that I might want to read at length, I open it into a new browser tab.
It seems that this is no longer an option. I can keep up with all the new posts via "All Posts", but the comment feed is now a mix of actually recent comments mingled with recommended content from years in the past, with the actually recent comments also appearing out of temporal order.
I would therefore like to know how other people engage with the site. What is the process by which you find out what's new, and how do you decide what content to read?