There is something to this, but I think in practice it won’t get you the experience you want. Short posts, published often, is the bread and butter of content marketers. which due to volume of posting would probably make up the majority of your feed. Admittedly, I don’t know the stats around publishing volume here, and only base this assumption off of my experience here and on other platforms.

To be clear, there is nothing intrinsically wrong in that kind of writing. It’s not my preferred reading material, but it’s also not evil. Based on your original story I think you’re looking for more considered, thoughtful pieces from writers you don’t know yet. I think a purely chronological view might make that even harder to find.

The problem — at least as I understand you to be defining it — is that you feel the recommendation feature is making it easy for people to game discovery. I’m not sure that’s the problem either. Whether it is a heart or five stars people are going to rate what they enjoy, which has to do with what they find first, which comes back to discovery.

I think the issue is part discovery algorithm and clairity on how certain tools work. The latter makes it harder for me to feed accurate information to the former. For example, the “Less stories like this” button. What does it mean when I click that? Less stories from this author, less with this tag, less from this publication? I don’t know, and so I’m nervous about using it. What if I inadvertently hide an entire area I am interested in?

To be clear, I don’t know the actual solution. Rather, what I hope these ongoing discussions produce is a better definition of the problem. Understanding the root issue will make it easier for Medium to engineer a solution.