The next thought was to search through all my old comment notifications in order to try to find it. "Blimey", I thought. "7,411 messages from lj_notify is quite a lot"; the beefy userinfo tells me that 4,402 of them were due to comments in my journal, so 3,009 must be result from people replying to comments I have left in other people's journals.
Then, as you probably don't, I had a burning desire to work out who most frequently inspired such comments. A fairly slow and undignified hack and thrash with QBasic later and I have the answer.
This is a count of the number of comments that have been sent to me by each other LJ user, whether the comment was a reply to me on my journal or on someone else's.

Comments: upon extracting every mail received from lj_notify@livejournal.com, the file is nearly 1½ million lines long. Trying to get the PC to alphabetise the file resulted, as you might expect, in a fairly hairy lockup. Thus QBasic program one was to cut out all the lines of the file which didn't start with From:. I sorted this reduced file and wrote QBasic program two to count how many times each person appeared consecutively. The rest of it was just simple text editing. I'm sure it can be done as a one-liner in perl. You can have the programs if you like, but it's probably far more efficient for you to knock the programs up yourself.
This would be a fantastically geeky and moderately nifty thing to be able to do automatically, but it relies on people keeping all their mail sent from lj_notify@livejournal.com, which is not a safe assumption. Unless, of course, you can think of a better way to do it which will not involve killing the LJ database.
I could have produced position numbers as well, but you don't really need them. If you don't appear close enough to the top that it's not too much of a problem to count then, my Friend, please don't bother counting. :-)
People who have changed username, or who have two different journals, do get ever-so-faintly shafted by appearing twice. Sorry 'bout that, chief. It's slightly funnier when you change journal name, because it means your new journal name appears twice. (This is because I uploaded the old journal name in its proper place, only for LJ to convert it forward into your new name.)
Having
No, I don't intend to repeat this at all frequently. There is no reason for you to try to appear higher on the list, but I can't stop you.
Yes, I probably should be doing something productive instead.
← Ctrl ← Alt
Ctrl → Alt →
← Ctrl ← Alt
Ctrl → Alt →