Re^2: Never! Too much Front Paging

...most nodes are reasonable nodes that most of our visitors deserve to see.

Doesn't that mean that casual visitors are likely to see a repetetive collection of mostly uninteresting questions and uninspiring answers?

Perhaps leading to thoughts of "same-o, same-o", and never inspiring them to be anything other than casual visitors?

I wonder how many copies of <Insert the name of your local newspaper> would sell if it published the headlines of every story inside, on it's front-page.

"Tiddles the cat lost"
"Tiddles the cat sighted"
"Tiddles the cat found"
"Mrs Brown's bunion clears up"

That is where the "front page" analogy comes from isn't it?

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

Comment on Re^2: Never! Too much Front Paging

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Re^3: Never! Too much Front Paging by tye (Sage) on Sep 24, 2004 at 16:55 UTC
I won't try to stetch your newspaper analogy. If we don't show the yucky stuff then most of our visitors won't realize there is any yucky stuff. And so they'll be more likely to ask the same yucky question that they've never seen. I said "most" not "all". If you feel comfortable front-paging a node, then do it. If you don't, then don't. Some yucky questions should be front-paged (so the FP stays somewhat representative of the site and so the majority of our audience see that we do get yucky questions and how we handle them and how we sometimes handle them badly), but it is nice if not all of the lowest-quality questions get front-page. Sometimes a run of near-duplicate questions should all be front-paged (for all of the same reasons). I still say that this boils down to "most". I feel that more than half of our SoPW threads on an average day are of reasonable quality and should be front-paged just because they don't suck. I believe that some of the other less-than-half should be front-paged in order to show some of the bad for any number of reasons (as examples, because they were bad in one way but good in another, just for variety). - tye	[reply]
Re^4: Never! Too much Front Paging by particle (Vicar) on Sep 24, 2004 at 17:09 UTC
i agree with you, tye. the front page is not a place of honor, it's a representative sample of approved nodes. i'd go so far to say that all approved nodes should be automatically frontpaged, and that frontpage rights could then be taken away. at least, that would make this discussion moot. of course, that makes newest nodes almost moot, but with demerphq's proposed changes (with some additions, like approval & moderation status,) it would make the purpose of these two interfaces (front page and newest nodes) clear. ~Particle accelerates	[reply]
Re^5: Never! Too much Front Paging (by default?) by tye (Sage) on Sep 24, 2004 at 17:30 UTC
I'm repeatedly tempted to make "approved" and/or "front-paged" the default state that can be taken away (because it should be the exception that doesn't get approved/FPed so it would save effort, for example). But many nodes (way too many) start out being inappropriate for their section (because they are so badly formatted) and even more start out inappropriate for the front page because they don't have a READMORE -- fairly long nodes aren't much of a problem being approved into a section but are more of a problem on the front page (but this is just a matter of degrees). - tye	[reply]