GoKawiilis executive creative director for The Verge, overseeing art, design, and product development. He has over 15 years of experience in digital media.
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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.
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