RE: PROPOSAL: INCREASE VISIBILITY of POSTS through RANDOMISATION
The Trending and Hot tabs are nearly useless, but practically every site has them. We shouldn't get rid of them. Perhaps we shouldn't have them prominently displayed though.
Your idea for a Random tab could be interesting and fun. There have been sites and extensions that show random sites and have been highly successful.
If we randomized people's feeds, it would really piss them off, and make it impossible to keep up with your friends. Adding a few random posts in occasionally might be good though.
You don't have to do it completely random though. You could do it based on the statistics of posts you've upvoted. Either you could do it very basic, where the tags you tend to upvote have a higher chance of ending up in your feed, or you could do it based on the words in the posts you upvote. In any case, there is potential for something similar to this.
You have some valuable feedback. Surely, absolutely Random will not help, but indeed, giving lower and higher chances for post to get some position. Wrt My Feed: posts are coming in at time chronological order and my suggestion is to shuffle them a bit. I actually dont think many Steemians use the My Feed to follow all those they follow. Too many Steemians follow way too many users for that. Reality is that those posts that are on top of the list gets the attention, the further down the list, the less chance to get noticed. Trending and Hot channels drives votes to those posts that already got rewarded a whole lot. I have a personal experience with that. One of my posts about two weeks ago, number 2 position in HOT channel, and somewhere in the top 30 of Trending channel, and it is the first post for two weeks in the dsound channel (dsound resteemed it). This post got soooooo much engagement + votes, and even now the post is about a week out of vote period, it still gets votes, from newbies. This is my personal real life case that is happening on a much larger scale in Steemit. Newbies vote for TRENDING posts. Most posts in TRENDING are getting there due to auto voters, therefore almost always the same authors in TRENDING. Once there, the posts stay there for quite a bit of time collecting lots of additional votes, just because the post is op in TRENDING. I have all sort of theories why those posts are voted for by newbies and small SP holders, and one of them is probably THE reason: to get noticed with the hope a powerful author will come to their blog and give a fat vote.
Yeah, and if they moved trending off the top, to in the side menu, and probably hidden in a submenu, it would have almost the same effect as just getting rid of it.
You make a good point about randomization of the feed. But I like them being in chronological order. Maybe a radomize button would be good though.