Those of you who have not filtered out content from the News Discussions forum in your What's New list have likely noticed an influx of News Discussion comment threads. When we shut down our forum system on Friday, the tool that automatically creates comment threads for news stories was shut down as well. This was just re-enabled today, and we did a batch update to create threads for all the news stories posted to the site since Friday. That's why you saw a whole chunk of them show up in the "What's New" list.
This is a temporary situation, and as people post content in other places, all that stuff will filter down and the home page will get back to normal again.
Thanks for your continued patience!