Jason Calacanis has a blog post entitled New views of Netscape Homepage/Hive where he writes
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):
I remember the same thing happening to Kuro5hin during the 2000 U.S. elections and the site never recovered. The site went from a more democratic version of Slashdot to being the precursor to DailyKos. As Jason points out, the reason is that people are more likely to comment on or post stories about politics especially during an election year than they are to post about AJAX design patterns or which startup got flipped to Google this week.
Imposing a quota on how many stories from a particular topic/section can show up on the front page sounds like a good way to enforce diversity on the front page. However it is likely to hide the true culture of the site which may actually be heavily tilted to being a political news site than a technology or general news site despite Jason Calacanis's best efforts. Time will tell if this was a good move or not. Either way, it is clear that the community is going in a different direction from what Calacanis and his cohorts at AOL would like. Welcome to the world of user-generated content. ;)