In general, the people we interviewed had not clicked on Top before. When prompted to explore it and talk about what they saw, they understood it was probably the more popular topics, but expressed some doubts and confusion about how they might have been chosen.
We decided that it was not providing enough value to justify taking another place on the top menu. Our current theory is that “less is more” as far as the top menu is concerned. The hope is that by removing as many things as possible will put more focus on what remains, which is currently Latest, Categories and Unread. Being able to hide Unread when there’s nothing there is still something I’m interested in.
It’s hard to say for sure that it’s been helpful, since we (unfortunately) did not have Google analytics installed beforehand. But based on those interviews I’m guessing it was still the right choice for us.
We will likely add one more item to the top menu when the “My Categories” plugin is ready to start testing.
Keep in mind though, this is an internal forum, so we don’t have to solve the problem of “I just landed here from a Google search, what is this place?”