Looking at the discussion, my impression has been that there are at least two things that’d be valuable:
Merge Main and Discussion. There doesn’t really seem to be any good reason to maintain this distinction: Main only gets one third of the posts that Discussion gets, and that’s combining the views of All + Promoted posts: the page with non-promoted Main posts only gets about one fifteenth of the posts that Discussion does. If you post something in Main and it doesn’t get promoted, basically nobody sees it. (Necessary caveat: RSS subscriptions and the like aren’t included in these figures.) That doesn’t make sense for the section of the site that’s supposed to be for the higher-quality posts, so it seems safe to say that the intent of the Main/Discussion distinction isn’t really working and is only needless complexity.
Do add a new subforum for submitting pure links, Reddit-style. Useful for collecting everything interesting from the LW Diaspora in one place.
Personally I’d also suggest:
Change the default sorting of topics in a subreddit from “New” to something like Reddit’s “Hot”, which sorts topics based on a combination of how many upvotes they have and how recent they are. This would help highlight quality topics better and keep them more visible. As an added bonus, I think somebody mentioned that it’s intimidating to post topics because if your topic gets downvoted it will hang around as a mark of shame for a very long time; this would help ease that problem, with downvoted topics dropping out of sight faster.
This is probably a good thing, but: at present it’s not that unusual for a post or comment to attract a few downvotes shortly after posting but then recover and end up positive. If downvoted things tended to drop out of sight, the second part of that process might not happen, and maybe that would be a pity.
Looking at the discussion, my impression has been that there are at least two things that’d be valuable:
Merge Main and Discussion. There doesn’t really seem to be any good reason to maintain this distinction: Main only gets one third of the posts that Discussion gets, and that’s combining the views of All + Promoted posts: the page with non-promoted Main posts only gets about one fifteenth of the posts that Discussion does. If you post something in Main and it doesn’t get promoted, basically nobody sees it. (Necessary caveat: RSS subscriptions and the like aren’t included in these figures.) That doesn’t make sense for the section of the site that’s supposed to be for the higher-quality posts, so it seems safe to say that the intent of the Main/Discussion distinction isn’t really working and is only needless complexity.
Do add a new subforum for submitting pure links, Reddit-style. Useful for collecting everything interesting from the LW Diaspora in one place.
Personally I’d also suggest:
Change the default sorting of topics in a subreddit from “New” to something like Reddit’s “Hot”, which sorts topics based on a combination of how many upvotes they have and how recent they are. This would help highlight quality topics better and keep them more visible. As an added bonus, I think somebody mentioned that it’s intimidating to post topics because if your topic gets downvoted it will hang around as a mark of shame for a very long time; this would help ease that problem, with downvoted topics dropping out of sight faster.
This is probably a good thing, but: at present it’s not that unusual for a post or comment to attract a few downvotes shortly after posting but then recover and end up positive. If downvoted things tended to drop out of sight, the second part of that process might not happen, and maybe that would be a pity.