On LessWrong, the frontpage algorithm down-weights older posts based on the time-since-posted, not the time-since-frontpaged. So, if a post doesn't get frontpaged until a few days after posting, then it's unlikely to get many views.
LessWrong has an autofrontpager that works a reasonable amount of the time. Otherwise, posts have to be manually frontpaged by a person. In my experience, this was always quite quick, but my most recent post was not frontpaged until 3 days after it was posted, so AFAICT it never actually appeared on the frontpage (unless you clicked "Load More").
I think the solution is to downweight posts based on the time-since-frontpaged.
That makes sense! I'll think about it, though probably fitting that complexity into the publishing process isn't worth it.
4Ben Pace
Relatedly, I've been thinking about building a schedule-this-post-for-publication feature. If I publish a post at 10pm, it's often better to publish the next morning for visibility. My guess is this would be useful for Inkhaven Residents who finish writing near-midnight.
If I could schedule, the frontpage review happened before publishing, and the schedule UI had "delay publishing until frontpage"[1] as a checkbox, this would be ~solved.
I'd prefer this to "delay publishing until human review", as ~half a dozen times in the past few years I've appealed via Intercom and had a human-reviewed page retroactively frontpaged (usually a resource, which LW team's priors seem to be something like 'this won't be maintained' but will because I optimize a bunch for not leaving stale projects).
Examples which Rafe requested when I ... (read more)