I read through your linked post, and I wonder if it would work better if the algorithm was something like this:
Take what is currently the two front pages (i.e., the current front page, and what you get to when you click "next" from the front page). Then randomize out of that set and show it to the user.
You could do that for any value N, perhaps even a fractional N (1.2, 1.5, etc.) to see how much of an impact it has.
Instead it sounds like you took /newest posts and randomly placed them on the front page. These may be completely or nearly completely unvetted, so it's not surprising to me people reacted to that. (Granted, this is with the benefit of hindsight and so on.)
Stepping back a bit, I'm not sure any of this will meaningfully change the "mob" dynamics of HN. But HN attention is so focused right now, I do think spreading that out might have an impact. Right now, posts tend to die off quickly and sometimes I wish discussions would live on a little longer than they do.
I definitely empathize with feeling that any change could make things dramatically worse.
> Take what is currently the two front pages (i.e., the current front page, and what you get to when you click "next" from the front page). Then randomize out of that set and show it to the user.
Well, that's essentially identical to what I suggested if you specialise it to 50% of submissions visible per user.
But yes, I agree that this would be an interesting experiment.
However it's easy enough for us to suggest experiments; and much harder for dang and friends to run them.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868928 (Dec 2019)