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This Site is Becoming a Blog for the Staff, Not a Forum for the Community [1]

['Dan K', 'View Profile', 'Greg Dworkin']

Date: 2026-04-16  

Ever since the new site came on line, I been noticing that the set of “Trending Stories” hasn’t changed much. In fact, if you look at when they were posted, most of them are 2-4 days old. That never happened on the old site; trending (or “recommended”) stories came and went as people’s interest in them waxed and waned.

The top of the site is all Staff now (except for a cartoonist). It used to be that staff stories took up much of the front page vertically, while the trending stories – almost by the community – took equal billing on the right. New stories followed lower on the page, and those that that caught our interest quickly migrated up to the more prominent trending space – as they should.

New stories now are placed further down, way below the top, and there is only space for eight. (It used to be 20 or more.) You now have to scroll past yet another staff-dominated section (“More Recent News”) to see more stories posted by the community. If you make it that far, you’ll see a LOT of complaints about the new layout.

So I’m adding mine. I can accept that the old site had serious security holes; I can live with the high learning curve to get used to the new way of editing. I put up with (for now) the inability to write comments with italics and links the way we used to (though I really miss the links; they were crucial). What I find disappointing, even distressing, is the way the new site is so heavily biased against the community.

The community is what made this place what it is, what has kept it going for over 20 years (and despite the profile bug, I’ve been here since 2004). We come here to share news, to explore ideas, to encourage each other to be strong in the face of the autocracy, to communicate with each other (community means communication, after all). The staff have always contributed their ideas, and have always monitored the discussions for rules violations. But until the changeover I never felt like they were trying to dominate the site while the rest of us were add-ons.

This can be fixed. But fixing it is not, primarily, a technological matter. It’s a matter of will, of conscious decisions about what this place ought to be.

I’m a longtime contributor here, not just in posts but also in discussions. I’m also a financial contributor; I recognize the value of this place and want it to continue. But not this way.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/16/800021592/community/what-happened-to-the-trending-stories/

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