That's definitely something we have to keep in mind going forward. thenewgreen and I were just brainstorming some ideas about how we might improve the new user experience. It's a valid point.Okay. The problem I have with this is that it makes it very hard to get started with the website quickly.
I'm not sure if this is actually a good idea, but on signup you could give them the option to enter a few tags they're interested in and have it select X users that post in those tags to follow at startup to populate their feed.
The tags served as topics, steering the experience towards the things I wanted to read. You could always use tags as a way to curate a feed, introducing some bias into how topics are sorted and displayed. "Areas of interest" if you will.