So a few things I’ve been thinking about to solve these problems:
I hope we can deal with Eugene after we have a better Karma system and better moderation tools. Though we will see how hard this problem turns out to be. But my guess is that even if it turns out to be harder, it is a problem that can be solved with sufficient, but not prohibitive, engineering effort.
This current page already has a more aggressive scoring system that keeps highly upvoted posts at the top for longer, and which applies an exponential decay function over time, which results in you getting a mixture of recent posts and top posts as you scroll down the frontpage, instead of mostly a historical list of posts. I hope this increases visibility. I was also thinking of maybe adding a “promoted” section to the top of the posts list that always shows the top 5 promoted articles (by time-decayed score), so that you have something similar to main, without it being a whole click away.
I am currently hesitant to create more top-level distinctions like main/discussion/forum, both because I think it decentralizes discussion, adds mental overhead and encourages styles in different parts of the page, which makes it harder to promote the best content from anywhere on the page (i.e. if the forum is mostly written in a style appropriate to forum, then it’s harder to promote that content to the frontpage with all the long-form content)
So a few things I’ve been thinking about to solve these problems:
I hope we can deal with Eugene after we have a better Karma system and better moderation tools. Though we will see how hard this problem turns out to be. But my guess is that even if it turns out to be harder, it is a problem that can be solved with sufficient, but not prohibitive, engineering effort.
This current page already has a more aggressive scoring system that keeps highly upvoted posts at the top for longer, and which applies an exponential decay function over time, which results in you getting a mixture of recent posts and top posts as you scroll down the frontpage, instead of mostly a historical list of posts. I hope this increases visibility. I was also thinking of maybe adding a “promoted” section to the top of the posts list that always shows the top 5 promoted articles (by time-decayed score), so that you have something similar to main, without it being a whole click away.
I am currently hesitant to create more top-level distinctions like main/discussion/forum, both because I think it decentralizes discussion, adds mental overhead and encourages styles in different parts of the page, which makes it harder to promote the best content from anywhere on the page (i.e. if the forum is mostly written in a style appropriate to forum, then it’s harder to promote that content to the frontpage with all the long-form content)