Well, you have to make somewhat of a secret sauce, because what you show on top should depend on what you want the top things and the people who see them to do. If you’re a site like reddit, putting highly-rated stuff on the front page is good, but what you really want is highly rated new stuff. But if you’re urbandictionary, you don’t really care when something was submitted, you want to put the best answer at the top—except that if a word has multiple definitions, you want to have variety in your top definitions. Or maybe you’re amazon, and you want people to see stuff they’ve already bought so it’s easy for them to rate it. Etc.
Well, you have to make somewhat of a secret sauce, because what you show on top should depend on what you want the top things and the people who see them to do. If you’re a site like reddit, putting highly-rated stuff on the front page is good, but what you really want is highly rated new stuff. But if you’re urbandictionary, you don’t really care when something was submitted, you want to put the best answer at the top—except that if a word has multiple definitions, you want to have variety in your top definitions. Or maybe you’re amazon, and you want people to see stuff they’ve already bought so it’s easy for them to rate it. Etc.