This is a great discussion. Discourse has a couple features that can help with this out of the box. One is that new users are limited in what actions they can do, and only gain new functionality as they interact with the site. I think for the purposes of the testing period the team raised the default permissions so you can see / do more.
There’s a similar discussion in this thread about what an onboarding flow would look like, and what tools we might be able to use (pinned topics, links to youtube intros, etc) might be helpful. Community Inspiration (Zebra's United layout and structure) - #3 by nms
It looks like it is possible to set default notifications setting for a group, so it should be possible to implement @andres.moya 's idea of having a blank slate. @Aamirah-WeAll what do you think about experimenting with these settings?
However this idea of having ‘layers’ of content that people opt-in to is a vote winner for me
@clive.wychwood I’d be curious to get your thoughts on whether the tags are a helpful way to start to track content you are interested in. The sidebar should show you when new topics are posted in tags that you are following