I've re-embedded the chat in the sidebar instead of having just the link to chat. One of the reasons why I tested using a link instead is that I realized that chat and the main site are like two different products. And one had an advertisement for itself running inside the main thing I'm trying to grow, and the other had pretty weak linking going the other way.

So in theory, it could act as a ratchet that pulls activity from one to the other. The silly reason why that is an issue is that I can promote a Reddit clone and grow it, but it's harder to promote a chat. But to promote a Reddit clone, it itself needs a lot of activity. So it's a bit like trying to get a fire to take off. And if you have something drawing heat away, it's harder to get that flame to ignit and self sustaining. That at least was the thought process.

But the real solution to the ratchet isn't to reduce connectivity from the front to chat, but to have both link to each other effectively. In theory, that's even better for retention for a few reasons. By having a significant link to the other, users can filter through to different areas and find where they want to be the most, and participate in the other now and again.

The posts will update every now and again. That is meant to make the attention grabbing symetric since the chat is able to show movement on the front page. It only seems fair.

An alternate method I'm looking to play around with soon is having a single post across the top and rotating random posts from the front page every 5 minutes based on the posts' current positions and an exponential distribution. Basically, that would mean you are more likely to see the top post than ones further down, but there would still be good variability. That might be a better pull (benefit in terms of keeping them symetric), while being less permanently distracting, overloading, and taking up real estate (cost). It also takes advantage of the fact that posts want to be horizontal.

That is the argument for why that might be better. But even if it is, we have to try something to then identify what we'd like to do next and why. So the side posts are the current implementation of linking back to posts in chat. I'm hoping to experiment with the other soon.