When Communities Split, the Front Page Becomes a Battlefield

jl

2026-02-09

7 min read 
Table of Contents

One Front Page, Many Expectations #

Every so often, a news aggregator hits a familiar moment of self-argument:

A topic is popular right now. It’s dominating the front page. And people start debating whether it “should” have so much coverage.

Which is understandable—until you remember what a news aggregator is.

On most aggregators, the front page isn’t a decree. It’s an outcome. People submit what they care about, vote on what they want to see, and that collective behavior largely determines what rises. If a topic is everywhere, it’s not (usually) because a cabal decided it should be. It’s because a lot of people are pulling the same lever at the same time.

So why does it feel like a crisis?

Because the argument often isn’t really about the topic. It’s about who “we” are.

Communities Are Built on Borders (Even When They Pretend They Aren’t) #

When people become part of a community, we tend to assume the community is distinct from “outside” communities.

We construct identity with contrast:

Over time, being “X” becomes more than a label. It becomes:

And that ownership matters. People want the place that gave them belonging to stay legible and stable. Not frozen in time, exactly—but recognizable.

Then X Splits Into X1 and X2 #

Eventually, inside almost any sufficiently large X, two sub-communities form:

Both groups still claim the banner of X.

But they also start defining themselves against each other:

Now you get the real tension:

Each group feels belonging to X and ownership over what X means…
while simultaneously feeling the opposite—alienation and rejection—toward the other subgroup.

It’s a contradiction you can feel in threads:

“This isn’t what this place is about anymore.”
“Actually, this is what this place is about.”
“Why are we letting this dominate?”
“Why are you trying to censor what people are interested in?”

A border forms. Not a formal one at first—just a social one. And then the front page becomes the terrain where the border is policed.

Here’s the Twist: The Conflict Usually Comes From Something Positive #

It’s tempting to treat the tension as pure toxicity. But often it’s rooted in something… almost wholesome:

Both X1 and X2 are trying to maintain the stability of X by resolving the contradiction.

They’re not only fighting to “win.” They’re fighting to make the community coherent again.

Both are trying to eliminate the internal mismatch between their sense of “what X is” and the reality that “X” now contains an alternative.

So what happens next?

The Classic “Solutions” (None of Them Great) #

When X contains two incompatible views of what X should be, you usually get one of these outcomes:

1) No solution: they fight it out until it settles #

Over time, differences get integrated, norms drift, and eventually everyone becomes accustomed to the new equilibrium.

This is the “weathering” strategy. It works… but it’s costly. People leave. Moderators burn out. The discourse degrades for a long time.

2) X1 or X2 (or both) leaves and builds elsewhere #

A fork. A splinter community. A new place with clearer norms.

This reduces internal tension inside X, but it also fragments attention and effort. The new place struggles with bootstrapping, spam, moderation, and culture-building—all the hard parts X already solved.

3) X exiles one side #

A ban wave. A rule change. A hard line.

This can restore coherence quickly, but at the price of resentment, loss of trust, and the slow corrosion that comes from enforcing one “true” identity on a group that no longer agrees on it.

None of these is good. They’re just the options you get when you insist there must be one front page and one definition of “what X is.”

There’s a Better Way: Stop Forcing One Shared View #

Technology gives us something communities didn’t historically have:

subjective interfaces.

We can give people tools to see more of what they want and less of what they don’t—without requiring everyone else to share their preferences.

Instead of arguing endlessly over what the one true front page “should” contain, we can admit something simple:

X isn’t one experience.
X is a shared pool of content and effort—plus a set of views onto it.

And those views can be customized.

Make X Remixable #

Here’s the idea:

Take X and bring it inside tooling that allows anyone to keep the parts they came for—but modify, extend, and remix the rest.

That’s perfectly achievable if people using X have any ability to take its content and recombine it into different “lenses.”

A concrete example: X as a feed of data #

Imagine X isn’t primarily a single front page. Imagine it’s a data feed:

Now put a filter + ranking layer on top.

Critically:
They’re no longer forced to fight over one shared front page.
And they’re not forced to “take over” the entire remainder of X just to make their experience tolerable.

They can disagree—without making disagreement the community’s central activity.

How This Reduces Conflict (Without Destroying the Community) #

This approach does a few important things:

It preserves the shared work #

Moderation is hard work. Spam-fighting is hard work. Culture maintenance is hard work.

A remixable-feed model keeps the base layer—the parts that protect the entire ecosystem—intact.

It relocates disagreement to the right layer #

X1 and X2 don’t need to rewrite what X “is.”
They need to maintain two different views of the same underlying stream.

It creates a healthier path for sub-communities #

Instead of “go start your own site,” you get something more like:

The Missing Piece: “Views” Need Maintainers #

If you want this to work at scale, user-side filters alone aren’t enough. Most people don’t want to write logic; they want to subscribe to something that feels coherent.

So you let new roles emerge:

People can then:

The community stops being a single border. It becomes a set of overlapping neighborhoods built on a shared infrastructure.

…And Then You Get the Real Payoff #

Profit—not in the money sense, but in the “we solved the thing that keeps happening” sense:

Most importantly: it lets people keep what they love about X without demanding that everyone else love it the same way.

Closing Thought #

A lot of online conflict is framed as a moral battle over what a community “should” be.

But often it’s an interface problem:

We took a diverse group, gave them one shared window, and told them that window represents the “true” community.

When X becomes many things to many people, the solution isn’t always to pick a winner.

Sometimes the solution is to stop insisting there must be only one front page.