It’s heartening to see what The Verge is doing with their transformation. They’ve stopped trying to optimize for spreading their content on social media platforms.
But publishing across other people’s platforms can only take you so far. And the more we lived with that decision, the more we felt strongly that our own platform should be an antidote to algorithmic news feeds, an editorial product made by actual people with intent and expertise. The Verge’s homepage is the single most popular page at Vox Media, and it should be a statement about what the internet can be at its best.
As a nod to the days before social media, they are reshaping the way they deliver their news and stories.
Our plan is to bring the best of old-school blogging to a modern news feed experience and to have our editors and senior reporters constantly updating the site with the best of tech and science news from around the entire internet.
In the statement of intent, they refer to the process as “blogging” several times, and that gives me hope that the site will indeed take the strengths that the internet had before it was dominated by social algorithms. The news feed that populates the new homepage of The Verge is innovative and, frankly, fun. The mix of heterogenous types of content makes for a scalable experience. Long-form and short-form, embeds and graphics are all together in an eye-catching design.
