zlacker

I think that having more content on the front page that isn't shallow industry gossip would have a positive effect on discussions overall - they tend to drag down the other threads, and bring in a lot of people who don't understand / follow the commenting culture here.

The new page is out of hand, IMHO - there's a huge incentive to be the first to submit an article (and no cost), so new content is continually posted. Many interesting posts fall off the bottom of the new page within an hour - a post has to quickly appeal to lots of people, or it's gone. This leads to lowest-common-denominator submissions.

Instead of moronic "first post!" comments, we've got a plague of "first submission!"s.

The sum of the scores on the new page divided by the oldest's age may be a good metric. Currently, the total is 217, and the oldest two say "1 hour ago" and "2 hours ago", roughly 90 minutes. That's only 2.4 points per minute, and this thread (118 points, 1 hour ago) is a major outlier; without it, it's 1.1 per minute.

Whether you make submitting articles cost karma (3-5 points?) and/or add a penalty for posting an article that was subsequently flagged and deleted, fewer dull submissions would improve discussions. (It would also help with spam.)

>>silent+(OP)
One potential solution to this problem is to distribute the load of evaluating the new page among the community. Look at StumbleUpon for an example of how one might go about this. All new links go into a pool. The user clicks the stumble button and a link is selected from the pool using a weighted random algorithm -- urls with lots of upvotes are more likely to be selected, new urls are more likely to get selected, etc. The user votes on the article, then requests another.

Maybe users should have to vote on X links on the new page for every Y links they view on the front page.

>>JesseA+P7
While that makes some sense, I'd rather see the firehose turned down a bit - otherwise the site is implicitly skewing itself toward the tastes of people who have time to sit and rate links all day.