The next evolution of The Verge’s homepage is here
When we updated our homepage in 2022, our primary goal was simple: The Verge should be fun to read, every time you visit. With that update, we introduced the homepage StoryStream and Quick Posts, and it was built to redesign the relationship we have with you, our audience. It’s been almost four years since then, and a lot has changed. The fall of Twitter, the rise of AI, and major shifts in how people discover and follow news have reshaped how readers find us and engage with our journalism. In all of that, one thing has become especially clear: You, our readers, are not a monolith. Some of you visit multiple times a day, every day. Others check in a few times a week. Some start with the homepage. Others come via RSS or newsletters. We’re lucky to have an audience that is both broad and deeply loyal. But it also means a single, fixed homepage has a hard time serving everyone well. One issue stood out in particular: Some of our best work simply didn’t stay visible long enough. Stories would move quickly through the reverse chronological feed and risk being pinned, breaking the flow of that feed, or compete for limited space in top stories. This meant some of our great reporting and ambitious packages could be easy to miss. This update is our first attempt at better balancing our work, which is part magazine, part firehose of news. On desktop, that means separating those two modes more clearly. The left side of the homepage is now where we highlight our top stories of the day, followed by story sets, which are collections of stories around a topic. These might center on a live event, a major news moment, or a larger package. The goal is simply to give important work more room to breathe and more time to be seen. The reverse chronological feed isn’t going away. It now lives on the right side of the homepage as an uninterrupted stream of everything we publish. No pinned stories, no non-chronological interruptions. Just the latest articles and Quick Posts, in order. Behind a toggle, you’ll still find the Following feed, with updates from the topics and authors you care about most. Elsewhere on the page, we’re continuing to surface collections of articles like Most Popular and Most Discussed, along with the latest from key areas we cover, including tech and reviews. On mobile, these same ideas translate into feeds you can toggle between at the top of your screen. All of this is meant to make it easier to move between two very real ways of reading The Verge: seeing our biggest reporting and what we think is most important, or diving into the firehose to pick what is most important to you. We’ve created a new Verge product updates page where we’ll share what we’re working on and what we ship. We’ve also started a user research group because we want to hear directly from you as we make decisions about what to build or iterate on next. In some cases, we’ll even share and test ideas before they roll out more broadly. We did that with this version of the homepage. To be clear, we don’t expect this homepage will solve everything for everyone. It’s shorter than the previous version by design because we plan to add to it and evolve it over time. There’s a lot more we want to explore! Maybe logged-in users can choose whether they land on Top Stories or Latest by default. Maybe articles you’ve already read are grayed out, making it easier to find something new to read. Maybe we try entirely new ways of organizing our work altogether! Some of these ideas will land. Some won’t. That’s part of the process we will be working with going forward. And this goes beyond the homepage: We’re working on getting dark mode out this year (finally), launching an app, and experimenting with federation. There are so many possibilities, and we’re excited to hear what you care about the most. This approach will take time to fully ramp up, and not every change will feel immediately valuable to every reader. But our goal remains the same: The Verge should be fun to read, every time you visit. We’re confident working this way, in the open and in collaboration with you, our readers, is how we all get there. It takes a lot of people to rethink a homepage. This experience was brought to life by the Verge product team, with contributions and support from teams across The Verge, including editorial, audience, art and design, and customer support. We also partnered closely with teams across Vox Media, including ads, analytics, and QA. Big thanks to Nilay, Helen, and David for their guidance and support throughout. We’ll keep sharing what we’re building next on our product updates feed. Follow along — tell us what’s working, what’s not, and what you want to see more of. We want to hear it all!
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