DPO used to have a suggested threads section under every thread, and I found it really useful for catching up on discussions. I don’t particularly care about the recommendations themselves, but that section would also show threads I’m tracking, with an unread marker.
This made it easy to go from one thread to another seamlessly. Now I have to finish reading a thread, go back to the New tab, open the next one, and repeat until I’ve caught up with everything I’m tracking.
We were noticing more replies resurrecting ancient topics, because it didn’t make it very clear that these were not recent, or how they were related. When we pointed it out a few times, even regular forum users where surprised they got tricked into replying to an ancient topic as if it were active.
If you want to find related topics to a topic, use the search features of the forums to search for related keywords. But mainly, stick to current conversations. For example authors refresh PEP discussions occasionally, and we close the old ones to point to those.
I run through the new list, open a tab for each item I want to see, and view in whatever order.
One annoying thing about this change - I can no longer scroll all posts to the top of my screen for ease of reading 
It’s annoying that I can’t keep scrolling down when I reach the end of a thread
