Thanks for chiming in. Yeah, what you said about ordering sounds pretty good to me.
Regarding new comments, maybe it wasn't clear from the exchange I had with @imwatsi. I was suggesting that we NOT have notifications for new comments, except if a user subscribes to the post. I was further suggesting that it would be very helpful if the user's feed somehow shows that there has been new activity in a given post. An example use case is: I open a post, read it, find it interesting (but don't want to subscribe to it as it's a hassle to click to subscribe on each post I'm interested in, and I don't want a lot of irrelevant notifications), then on the next day there have been more comments on it and I have a way to visually tell, as I'm scrolling through my feed, that there have been X new comments on this post since last time I opened it.
This is similar to scrolling through my feed in Facebook and being shown new comments under posts in a group that I'm subscribed to.
Does this make sense to you?