Netscape To Move From Tech/Politics Focus with its Digg.com Rip-Off

Netscape has been running a Digg-clone experiment for five months now to test two alternatve homepage designs in an attempt to increase the site's popularity and its little-used topical categories. It's solution: Stop listening to its audience. Huh?

Jason Calacanis (the guy who runs the Netscape property) spoke with TechCrunch about the heavy traffic the tech and politics categories get, but its other 31 channels (including things like Books and Women) are hardly ever used. The new project is a user news site that looks a lot like digg's design. Now, Netscape wants to tweak its formula to boost news from other categories rather than leaving it up to its own users. Because it's user-generated content and voted on by users, the front page sees a lot of tech and politics news. Netscape wants its front page to reflect popular news from all categories. My question is, if you are going to offer a system that allows users to decide what is important, why the hell would want to change the front page to reflect what Netscape -- not its users -- wants to see? Apparently Netscape users agree, as some people have commented things like: “It’s getting to the point where I’m just about ready to close my Netscape acct. altogether,” “I hate the new Netscape!,” and “The new Netscape is a big disappointment.” As the TechCrunch author says in his sign-off: "Of the 15 comments posted as of the time I am writing this, only four seem to be on the topic requested by the post author, none were strongly pro-Netscape and 9 were basically asking for the old Netscape portal back. Welcome to the world of user generated content, Netscape users." Hopefully Netscape will wake up and realize if something works, don't mess with the formula. If your books section isn't popular, realize that it might be because nobody gives a crap. If you create a community for users, don't go and change it based on what works for you and not them.