From previous threads, I think that about half of us use the Active Button to find new threads and about the other half use the Topics functionality to see what's going on.
The problem with the Topics methodology is that some topics are very popular, and everything gets bunged into them. AIBU is the case in point. Because there's lots of traffic in AIBU, if someone wants a quick answer they post something like: "AIBU to ask you to recommend me a good highchair" hoping that all the people who hang out in AIBU will answer them. And then Trills the rest of us who aren't interested in a highchairs, but are interested in whether or not someone is unreasonable will get upset.
Conversely some sections are severely neglected, like WWYD (What Would You Do) - a space presumably designed to to the job of AIBU but in a less bun-fighty way. But it's like a bloody morgue in there - I once posted something in there and struggled to get a response. So the next time I had a WWYD, I came back to AIBU and had a bumfight instead.
The Solution? Put things in the right place and use Active to see what's going on.
Now here's the clever bit... What about all those high chair questions, I hear you say? They're going to come up on Active Convos and annoy me there instead. Well you just need to go to Customise and at the bottom there is the option to ignore topics in the Active Conversations. It's quite a small link so you might need to look hard. And then you can hide the highchairs and all the other bits of MN you aren't interested in. It only takes a couple of minutes and you need never be bothered with highchair talk again unless you want to be.
There's a serendipity factor in the Active Convos approach too. You might come interesting threads that you would have missed by sticking exclusively to one or two topics like AIBU and Chat.
Obviously this approach won't work for those who exclusively use MN for one or two specialist subjects, and I do know a lot of us do it already.
AIBU? 