One of the tools that might be made more useful is the news feed though maybe if it was more predominant but the main thing that would help improve it is maybe remove likes from the feed. With the number of stories being liked that is mostly what you see on the feed. It isn't really helpful as is as you get a bunch of random names liking different stories. A quick check of the new feed when writing this shows twenty feed items. Twenty three or likes, one is an award. Good for him but not all that useful on the feed. And one comment which might be useful if I liked the story. No recently published chapters or new stories or anything which would seem to be actual worth putting in a news feed to me. Plus the news feed seems far shorter then then the original discovery page when you first sign in and could be longer to feature more stories.
Agree with removing likes. Also, remove profile pictures, put all the data on a single line, remove completely wasted empty space, and make everything smaller...same solution as most other problems with the main site, honestly. Also, combining the feed with two generic sidebar clickbait/malware advertisement choices pretty much guarantees most people will ignore it.
I'd be ok with the news feed showing likes if it was curated at all. Perhaps likes of my followers and those who I follow.
I disagree with everyone else here, the newsfeed featuring likes to my stories is the metric by which I decide what to work on every time I come back to the site.
I think you're describing your personal notifications, showing engagement with your own stories. This thread is discussing the main page news feed (top center, just below the search bar), which is showing everyone's likes, all the time.
After thinking about it a little bit more, I think that likes should be removed, as well as bookmarks, but author follows and story favorites should remain, as those are significant enough to warrant further attention from other people.
