This issue has driven us crazy for years. We did a lot of harm to the community by abandoning the publishing model, which captures a deliberate signal of human intent (“this is ready for others to see, and in fact I want them to see it”), in favor of notebooks just being continuously “public”, which results in a meaningless stream of newly created documents that aren’t ready to say anything to an outside reader.
(I could get into the reasonable business motivations from that time, but… idk, beside the point! It wasn’t good.)
Anyway, in the new Observable we’ve gone back to the publishing model, and we’ve invested in making the public community listings more prominent and navigable again. Go to “Public” in the workspace switcher in the upper left:
https://observablehq.com/public
Now, granted, if you go to “Recent”, there’s still the issue that it’s pretty dominated by student notebooks which may be speaking more to an instructor than to a general public. And we’re trying to get a handle on spam, which has gotten more sophisticated. But… it’s better!!