It works great if you pick the set of people whose threads you would like to see. That way encourages discoverability since you see your 'followee's posts but also other people on those threads that you may find you're interested in.

This is the approach I took with my hystry interface for HN. I have whitelists and blacklists, and show threads involving people on the whitelist but not comments by people on the blacklist. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71827