The increasing uselessness of Promoted

Good lord. I haven't been on LW in quite a while, but I wholeheartedly agree.

The collection of articles currently on the front page are painfully useless to someone looking to discuss "the art of human rationality" rather than be inundated with content blatantly serving the interests of a particular company/organization.

This content will (for the most part) appeal to people already in the fold. But what, in any way would a newcomer to the site gain from articles titled:

• [ACRONYMYOUHAVENEVERHEARDOF] Is Hiring!
• Why Is Our Company Great? Click Here To Find Out!
• Donate Money To Us, Please!
• Read About What Our Company Does - It's Super Important!
• Please, Take Our Survey And Maybe WIN BIG!

Are these massively unfair oversimplifications of the actual content of the articles? Yes. Are these roughly along the lines of what a newcomer to the site will hear in their brain when they look at the front page? Almost certainly.

This makes sense to me, but perhaps it's best expressed in the LessWrong potential changes post

Yes, this has been a problem for some time - I just bookmarked the "New" page and completely ignored "Promoted" since the beginning...

I agree, keeping in mind that this is easily reversible and that promoted posts will remain visible. And if anyone is thinking that this would reduce the apparent quality of the blog, the very worst Main posts are usually moved to Discussion by an administrator/moderator.

As for the plausibility of implementation, this blog ultimately does not belong to its userbase.

How does the promoted thing even work? There's only one article that was written recently (one year ago), two from 2009 and one from 2007. (all sequences)