Yeah, there's definitely some imbalance that's stripping the main page of content. I think it's pretty conclusive that the intermediate 'top-level-articles-not-promoted' category should just be abandoned and articles should be promoted directly from discussion. But anything that requires code modifications should be ruled out as a reasonable prediction for the short/medium term.
I think it's pretty conclusive that the intermediate 'top-level-articles-not-promoted' category should just be abandoned and articles should be promoted directly from discussion.
This would raise the pressure on authors in discussion section, which is undesirable, and eliminate the explicit category of carefully crafted on-topic articles that don't get promoted, which I believe is also undesirable.
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"?