Poll: How do you read HN?

Some people, like myself most of the time, check out the newcomments page to see what's hot and then read the article and join in to things that seem stimulating.

Other people (like myself other times) come in to the main page and read all the stories that have high scores and might seem interesting, then come back to the comments.

Still others read each story individually, decide whether to vote, and then read the comments as a huge hierarchical tree. Then they come back to that article on HN and check out the comment tree from time to time to see how it's changed.

Finally some folks are our "diggers" -- checking out the new page first and ranking those articles for others to consume.

It occurs to me that different ways of reading HN create different standards for what "fits" as a good comment or not. If you read HN for discussion primarily, checking the newcomments as a gateway into dialogue, you think of HN more as a slow version of IRC. Comments that veer to a small degree off-topic are okay as long as they continue dialog.

If, on the other hand, you view HN as creating a comment tree ranked by "goodness", then comments must both fit neatly into the main topic at all times and also make sense when compared to geat-great and great-great-great grandparent comments.

So what is it? How do you read HN?