Comment by jimmyvalmer
4 years ago
This is equivalent to paying more to move one's ebay listing up the page, except instead of money, it's sweat equity of dashing off a separate email. I shall automate an email with every vanilla upvote I make to defeat this initiative.
All the email does is get us to look at the link. After that it's the same as if we'd run across it on /newest or any other way.
When I say we usually add them to the pool, that's because the emails are usually from high-quality users with good taste. If that stops being the case usually, we'll stop adding them to the pool usually.
The purpose is to find more interesting things, where "interesting" means things that the community finds interesting. We use our own intellectual interest as a proxy for that, but only as fuel for the first stage.
I don’t see, how this applies as long as this is maintained by the mods. (Surely, they have an eye on the incoming stream anyway and won’t promote any submissions solely based on the fact that there is an incoming email.)