The LW homepage algorithm should place more weight on recency (relative to karma), for highly active users.

If a user has <2500 karma, often when they publish a post, it will get literally zero time on the homepage. And so ~nobody will see it. Probably some of these posts are good but since they never appear on the homepage they never get to experience the virtuous cycle of getting upvoted ⇔ more people reading them.

Meanwhile when I go to lesswrong.com, I mostly see posts that either I've already read or I've already decided not to read, since I go to lesswrong.com multiple times per day.

It would be slightly better for me if the algorithm put more weight on recency when showing me posts, and it would be better for others because I'd sometimes read good recent-low-karma posts and upvote them so others could see them!

And I sometimes feel discouraged about posting because I think maybe I'll write a post people-would-like-if-they-saw but nobody will see it. The solutions are bad:

• Sometimes I write things-that-should-be-posts as shortforms because it's easier for shortforms to be seen. (But I think the shortform algorithm should also be tweaked, similarly to the post algorithm.)
• Sometimes when I publish something and the homepage-bar that day is too high for a brand-new 9-karma post to be shown (or it drops off the homepage after just a few minutes, before experiencing the virtuous cycle) I get a friend to upvote it. It's bad that I have to do that! And often those posts then do well; it's not like the algorithm is correctly predicting that the post won't do well.

And I'm privileged to have my posts start with 9 karma — it's way worse for people whose posts start at ≤6 karma!

(I've DMed the LW team about this several times, to no avail, but maybe if I post here it'll work. I feel like this might be a super easy way to make LW like 5% better — partially from showing-people-better-posts and partially from making authors feel better about writing posts.)