Netscape has announced that they are going to stop considering and even counting the number of stories promoted to the front page by individual users. Many have compared this to Digg’s removal of the top users list, and Muhammad at Pronet Advertising has an interesting analysis of the situation.

Although the move is indeed similar to the one at Digg, Netscape’s community has embraced it without much fuss while the removal of Digg’s top user list has cause a significant amount of negativity. This is partly due to the fact that Digg community is bigger and more vocal than Netscape’s, but it also shows that the top list turns out to be just a side-feature, not in any way crucial for social content sites like Digg or Netscape.