> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time.

This is the biggest one IMO.

One of the problems with new stories (for me at least) is when they are submitted. I often see something interesting in the rss feed that was submitted several hours before I got to it. Upvoting on a story that old is useless, if it hasn't reached critical mass by some time threshold, no one will see it.

It is a good filter for low quality content, but it also filters out things I find interesting.

It's the same with comments. I usually join discussions several hours late. Mostly because I live in Europe. Usually I get 1 or 2 up/down votes and almost no answers.

So I generally think that good stories shouldn't decay as fast as they do. And maybe also when there is some activity on them.

Maybe also we should have some category like "best stories of yesterday", putting some fresh attention to the good ones.

> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like.

I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for the front page to have a few "new" articles show up as well. Like, sprinkled throughout the list, or maybe just show three of them at the top. Get them in front of the whole audience, rather than just the small subset of users that visit the "new" page regularly.

Long-time lurker here. I really would appreciate that as I'd rather check a couple of new stories while at the same time glancing over the current top-stories. Reducing this by one click (I know, I'm lazy) would be great!

If you're using Chrome (or any other Chromium based browser) - you can try this extension - http://bit.ly/dTI5Oq - it displays new & top side by side.