As other folks have mentioned there is a raw feed if you want to see a non-penalized version.
It would be interesting if it somehow incorporated other elements to determine article "value":
- Open rate
- Ratio of comments to opens
- Time spent on article or comments
- Depth of comments
I agree there are big network effects to sharing folders and that is a big push to sign up. Paying is a different story however. If you are a casual non-business user, sharing photos or the occasional document (e.g., Grandparent use case) then even the annoying space restrictions won't move you to pay.
What if you allowed people to pool money for it? Give $1 a week to the winner based on up votes and then that money goes for whatever the ask is. Automatic charges on your card, reminder every week to vote. Eliminates some of the more frivolous uses.
People are getting hung up on the card favor. A couple unsolicited suggestions:
- Show more than one idea on the homepage and allow people to up vote what they think is best
- Idea with most votes gets sent out to folks every X
Advantage is this let's the community pick what is relevant, makes your life easier (less editorial), enables you to grow to more than 1 idea per week as there might be runner ups, likely to increase the quality of what people submit as there will be competition.
Mostly agree with your post, however I think you misunderstand the scalability argument. If you are wasting any time on making an MVP scalable it probably means you are taking time from more important activities such as sales and acquiring users.
You can have the best automated workflow that scales perfectly, but it will not beat the manual workaround if you have 5 users. You get the users, you build, automate and optimize. For a lot of things the initial users won't be able to tell the difference so no UX impact.
It would be interesting if it somehow incorporated other elements to determine article "value": - Open rate - Ratio of comments to opens - Time spent on article or comments - Depth of comments