The discussion section has sucked all the interesting topics away from the main page. What remained is a not very good advice column with a rationalist flavor. The last promoted article that interested me was posted on Jan 18, and the last non-promoted such article was on Feb 14 (not counting Stuart's posts, which are interesting but more of the "thinking out loud" variety). So I can safely stop checking "Recent Posts" for a month, or two months if I'm restricted to seeing promoted posts only. In the discussion section, on the other hand, there's been tons of interesting stuff over the last month.
I find the discussion section way less scary to post to. Mind you, I've so far posted a link and a question.
The number of meetup announcements on the main blog has been increasing. Though it's reasonable to try to get meetups high visibility to increase the chance that people who are nearby see the announcement, the posts themselves are content-free.
How difficult would it be to, instead of promoting meetup announcements, tag them "meetup" and put a "meetups" section in the sidebar, similar to "recent comments" or "recent posts"?