Ah, my condition has a name. All it needs now is a support group. My case become terminal when I discovered three finger drag on OSX.
HN is a particularly good site to do it on because of the little lines and gaps that appear between selected blocks of comments. You can get a very satisfying 'pop' of a multi-comment selection springing from a single one if you move your mouse just a bit while dragging over the gap between one comment and the next.
I don't much mind about the structure, but it'd be really nice if it all lined up perfectly straight.
Scrolling without selecting is just disorienting when I'm reading.
Sometimes unconscious compulsion, otherwise to put together a quote in the context of an existing thread.
I immediately noticed this feature due to the high number of discards :)
When using keyboard it's not that important, since one quickly learn how much PgDn scrolls, but when using mouse it is good to have a selection marker to quickly continue to read from there after scrolling.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magicscroll-web-re...
the same here.
Edit: don't need to share all that, I think.