Art, hi there. That is a good question. I can see that the team here needs to provide some best practices on how to manage all the streams and activity on the site. I would recommend using Tracking to stay on top of content that means the most to you. Tracking is different from Following a community.
Tracking is for more critical content that you want to keep track of regularly. It allows you to clear out all the posts on the page by "marking all read" or viewing unread only. To track, you have to go to a forum/community (or individual thread) and click the blue "Track in Communications" to the right of the page.
This will then send all updates to : https://communities.sas.com/communications
Following a community (the green plus mark at the top of a page) sends those posts to your Activity Stream here: https://communities.sas.com/activity
See: https://communities.sas.com/docs/DOC-1153 and
https://communities.sas.com/message/122495
cc'ing
