You are not! Here are the top ten pages by pageviews:
It’s not unusual for the root page (http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/) to be the most visited page on a site. That’s the page new visitors land on. Latest is a very close second. Most returning visitors sit on the Latest to see what’s new. Then there are many visitors who come just for the Parent Cafe. I won’t go through the list, but it’s interesting to see how other people use the site.
It’s understandable that a bunch of new posts will get in your way when we are preparing for Early Decision season. I mentioned in another topic that you can preemptively mute threads by tag. Something else that I do is track or even watch every new thread in a category I am interested in. I have the Community & Forum Issues category set to watch every thread in the category. When people post there, I get a notification. (Yes, it can be a lot!) So I spend most of my time looking at my own notifications and less time watching Latest.
Philosophical aside
Many (all?) of the most popular social media platforms use algorithms to predict what users are most interested in. The algorithms are fairly effective at guessing what you might click on next. But the algorithms are designed to drive more views and more engagement at the cost of your time. For instance, I watched a video about poker once on YouTube and the algorithm now thinks I want to see all the poker content. I’m tempted to watch suggested poker videos, but I know I don’t want to fall down that rabbit hole.
As a more traditional forum, CC gives members control over what they see. It’s a better model because I can decide whether I want to see certain types of content rather than being tempted by the algorithm. The cost is that it doesn’t happen automatically. So there are situations, like this one, where we know a lot of people will see a wall of topics they probably aren’t interested in.
@CC_Sorin and I will put our heads together to see if we can post these threads in a way that doesn’t disrupt Latest too much. It might be that just doing them as quickly as possible will be best since it reduces the number of days people will see the flood. In the meantime. please mute tags, categories and topics that you don’t want to see. And thank you for your patience.