I’d say community culture & norms is the most common approach here. While on BoingBoing you can rack up crazy high Like scores with a killer joke or political burn, here on Meta the more sure-fire ways of getting your content Liked (and consequently appearing in Top) is to:
- Help someone (the more the better)
- Fix something
- Create something
- etc.
…because we the staffers have been actively and publicly applauding this behaviour. The algorithms are already in place; the rest is good old fashioned community management.
One fairly low-hanging fruit we could explore here though would be to have a setting for “send me an Activity Summary even when I’m logged in”, which in effect would be more like a “cool stuff you might have missed” email. That would give the most popular topics an additional boost.