How do you choose to respond to this or that discussion?

I have over thirty friends on mylot and what I do is answer the emails that come to me each day. I usually get around 20 emails from my mylot friends telling me that they have started a new discussion. I respond to those first then I look for discussion in my areas of interest. I chose to answer your question because it is one that I felt I could answer.

I just work down the list to the left under discussions and anything that I feel able to contribute to in some way I do so . Some make no sense to me or I find irrelevant so I just skip them some days you can spend an hour or more and not find anything .

There are lots of ways to respond to discussions here in mylot. Several has been mentioned by you. As you can see on your mylot page, it could either be "today's top discussions", "discussions from my interests", "new discussions", "recent discussions", "discussions i've responded to",... and so on and so forth. Now, have you ever tried to open up your friend's UNRESOLVED DISCUSSIONS? Well, it is also more likely to respond to discussions from it. Because that means no replies or the user has not chosen the best response. Suggests to always check your unresolved discussions, and if you found your friend having no response, go ahead and try reply to those discussions to clean up his/her unresolved folder.