It was built on Drupal 5. Here's the write-up where the dev team fielded questions and kudos for the work: http://drupal.org/node/221481

But just yesterday I loaded it up and it looks like they've tucked away all the social elements into footer links and are now just featuring articles on the front page. It's a much more conventional presentation.

http://www.fastcompany.com/

When did this happen? I can't find anything on the web announcing, reviewing or explaining the change.

As a web publisher who's always interested in new ways of presenting content and making it interesting to my audience, I'm really curious about the thinking that went into this. Was the redesign a big flop? And if so, shouldn't someone say that?

Over on that Drupal page, people are still congratulating the developers on their success as of November. That strikes me as a bit odd considering the site's done away with much of their handiwork in favor of tried and true "just list the stories" approach.

For a long while I believe that there could be a way to meld editorial and reader-submitted/rated content on one page. But the more I've thought about it, worked on it and shown it to people, the less it makes sense to me.

I'm now more or less of the mindset that you have to pick one approach and do it well. Either you bring new information to the web and let everyone else rip off the highlights, editorialize and discuss it with their readers, or you aggregate and build community around other people's work. I've not seen a single hybrid approach work yet.