The Netscape homepage has been taken over by political stories. I hate politics, and seeing 1/3rd of the stories on the home page related to “Bush Sucks/Is Great” stories has really burned many of the users out.

You see, people vote 2-3x as much on political stories and they comment 10-30x a much on those same stories. So, we’re gonna change the home page to be one of the two below (descriptions by CK from his post on the issue):

• http://www.netscape.com/hometest/ This first variant of the homepage checks to see what are the top 10 Channels at any given time, and then it pulls the top 3 stories from each of the top 5 channels and the top 2 stories from each of the next 5 channels and ranks these stories on the Homepage. As a result, no single channel will ever have more than 3 stories on the homepage, but only the top 10 channels will ever appear in the rankings.
• http://www.netscape.com/hometest1/ This second variant of the homepage checks to see what are the top 25 Channels at any given time, and then it displays the top story from each of those channels and ranks them.

Of course, we are stilling going to have a straight ranking available for folks, but as a scale business we need a balanced view.

My vote is for the “top story from the top 25 channels” because:

• a) it gives users the cream of the crop–all #1 stories.
• b) it gives users more motivation to post to the smaller channels (i.e. books, travel, etc) because they can now break onto the home page.
• c) it will drive folks to the channel pages for the fuller experience (i.e. the political folks can go to the politics page to battle it out amongst themselves.

What do you guys think?

Note: Yes, we might let users set their own home page style.