However, we concluded that the biggest problem is false negatives -- good stories that never made the home page -- because of submissions to /newest that simply don't get enough *attention*. There are too many stories and not enough eyeballs. As a result, there is not enough data to know if a story would do well if it were shown on the front page or not.
You can see this from the fact that there are many stories that are submitted multiple times, and 4 out of 5 submissions get only 1 or two no upvotes, and then the 5th makes the front page and gets hundreds. Sometimes it's due to timing factors -- the story has become relevant for some reason -- but often its just luck.
It means a lot more scrolling, but the quality of what I did read improved notably.* Not all great posts are made by the popular users.
* It also made me aware of how many not-so-good and lazy posters are out there, but that's all part of the deal.
Besides, if you are here for gentrified reddit and upvotes, you want to read newest anyway so you can get in early on the comment game, because posting when something has 50 comments already is a waste of time.