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@Asaf Karagila, I suspected it was you, but how come this doesn't seem to be reflected in your profile page? (Unless it wasn't "you". :P)
Your reply about serial voting answers my question, thanks. (Although you might want to edit the sentence that starts "Serial voting is [...] a trade secret but" if it is a trade secret.)
Also, FYI, it's been almost 10 hours but it seems the serial voting mechanism hasn't kicked in yet. Maybe in a while...
With the sort of voting patterns we have on MO, the proposed front page sorting would promote the sort of questions that get locked on StackOverflow. These are not typical questions for SO, and certainly not for MO.
@jtunnell: you explain us things we know. It makes little sense to just repeat this. Could you perhaps at least answer my question why this frontpage is not used for SO?
And by the way the old MO frontpage was not "newest" but "active" (and was this even different on SE2.0?)., in any case both would be better then this selection.
+1 Yemon.
+1 Yemon.
@Michael Greinecker: The link "(again)" in my first post in this thread leads to a thread containing various information. In the middle it was about something else, but scroll down to contributions by Willie Wong and me towards the end for several links. In particular, on meta.math.SE there is http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/9820/what-is-on-front-page-for-new-unregistered-users and in a comment to the answer it contains a so far unanswered/unnoticed(?) question addressed at the math.SE moderators.
@joro: I do not think your description that the number of upvotes for a tag badge is lower is quite to the point. Rather it seems that on 2.0 there are also bronze tag badges (in addition to silver and gold we have here). For the existing ones (silver and gold) they are actually somewhat harder to get as here it is 400 and 1000 votes, resp., while then it will be also 400 and 1000 but in addition one needs 80 and 200 answers, resp. For bronze it is 100 votes and 20 answers.
Earlier, jtunnell identified himself/herself as a mathstackexchange PM (not sure what this means; principal moderator?). Who will play the corresponding roles for MO 2.0? I'd sure like it if the current moderators will continue as such; they've been really great all this time -- consistently fair, firm, and at the same time sensitive and polite.
Whoever they are to be, I hope they are also mathematicians who are active on MO and who will continue to be sensitive to our concerns (the interchange with jt, or lack thereof, hasn't been exactly encouraging to me).
@Todd Trimble: PM is product manager see the page I assume to be jtunnell's userpage on meta.SO (but this was also the user answering a question on meta.SO on the frontpage so this seems like a very save assumption).
Who the moderators will be for MO is defined in an agreement Anton Geraschenko mentioned some time ago in the transition thread; in brief and from memory, we keep the current ones and if the need arises there will be elections of new ones in consultation with the current ones. (In general for the SE sites I think moderators are elected by the respective communities, too.) There are some general moderators (SE employees in part or all of them) around, but judging from math.SE (while I am not active there I passively follow their meta since some time in some detail) they rather limit themselves to technical matters (how does this work, why doesn't this work, things like this).
Thanks for the reassurances, guys.
While SE is sorting out the new better front page behavior, what's the harm in MO having our old behavior instead of the other old behavior? The current SE2.0 default is bad in general and particularly bad for MO. I don't at all understand the claim that the front page that registered users use doesn't consist of typical questions.
Otherwise the new site looks great. Feels familiar but also looks better.
network-wide managers do very little moderation
I seem to recall one case on MSE where an account was closed, and after a question in Meta is was found that it had been closed at the user's request (all his accounts in the entire SE system) by a network-wide manager.