Are there any less intense ways to follow the links that pop up here, whatever 'less intense' might mean to you? Maybe just posts that hit the top 10, maybe only posts that linger on the front page for a certain amount of time.
This isn't a perfect solution, I miss a lot of interesting stuff that doesn't reach my point threshold and it isn't as smart as the frontpage algorithm, but it is what I've had to do to be able to follow Hacker News.
Filtering on points or comments will cut off the long tail.