It feels like using the homepage traffic to validate /new has a lot of promise, and maybe some tweaks could solve the problems you had. One idea I had from reading your comments and dan's article is to have a permanent slot on the homepage with something from /new in it.
I think you could address the issue that "readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page" by making it clear with a special visualization, that this slot is special. You could also add a "report low quality" button which would make that story less likely to appear in the random slot in the future.
You could even add a "show me another" which fetches another random story instead.
So roughly:
- somewhere near slot 5 we add a special "new" slot, visually identified as such
- on each page load, the slot is given to something randomly posted in the last 8 hours
- the slot is different for each request/user, so everything on new gets seen a little bit
I think you could address the issue that "readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page" by making it clear with a special visualization, that this slot is special. You could also add a "report low quality" button which would make that story less likely to appear in the random slot in the future.
You could even add a "show me another" which fetches another random story instead.
So roughly:
- somewhere near slot 5 we add a special "new" slot, visually identified as such
- on each page load, the slot is given to something randomly posted in the last 8 hours
- the slot is different for each request/user, so everything on new gets seen a little bit