A somewhat related question since you’re here: do you have any ideas for people who don’t really vote to do this kind of dredging? Personally, I tend to use upvote/downvote a lot more cautiously than most people, treating it as some might consider “favorite” or “flag” (in fact, I run into the dilemma on which to use quite frequently; a notable narcissistic exception is that I will upvote my content if it’s posted here). I’d like to be able to mark something as “this is on-topic for Hacker News” but not mark it as “I liked it”, which I can’t really find a button for as upvoting does both…
I agree that "on topic vs. off topic" and "like vs. dislike" are two different signals, and it's possible that "on topic vs. off topic" is actually the more valuable signal for surfacing good stories. But how would we encode this in the UI? The upvote arrow is by now a standard UI mechanism. It isn't obvious how we might factor it into two completely different things.
I check the new section from time to time and I agree with the link you posted that there is a lot of junk/spam in there. It's no surprise that they can't just be randomly put into the main pages.
Having a look at the 15 latest submissions for example. I roughly see: SEO spam, trump spam, a super complex physics paper, 4 well known news site, 3 university websites, VC spam, spam, one pdf download, a couple of articles, etc...
I think HN could do with a "curated new" section besides the general "new" section. A bit of filtering to remove high volume subjects (virus, climate, trump) and to remove major news sites (new york times, bbc and co) and maybe university/paper sites. That should leave room to lower volume sites and personal blogs. Maybe filter to domains that had at least one article with 100 votes in the past years and see what's left.
Well, there's also the flag mechanism for the negative direction. Perhaps there could be a way to flag something as off-topic without filling up the moderator queue?
