An idea I had the other day, not sure if it's been suggested or discussed before: the notion of "editors" of sorts. Not necessarily people who curate content at all, but merely suggestions of people to follow for newcomers who regularly post/share quality content in certain tags: so you would have a few "news" editors, a few "politics" editors, et cetera.
Suggested "editors" wouldn't even necessarily have to be people: URLs could be listed. For example, I'm always pretty damn well satisfied with every post I find from medium.com.
The problem I see with this is the system becoming as problematic as the reddit subreddit system, not allowing for variation. That's why I think having them as pure suggestions would be interesting. Having them renew/update would be interesting, too - perhaps every few months, to avoid stagnation etc.
Thoughts?