Are you getting the same thing I am? A page with a bunch of posts that have a few shares, usually 1-3, but none of the "top" posts? In which case, what makes those posts popular?
I think it would be great if mk changed popular to "popular unshared" and unshared to "new unshared." Your hubski experience would be broken into three distinct experiences - your feed, popular posts that aren't in your feed, and brand new posts that aren't in your feed. As Saydrah mentioned, you don't get the "front page" effect that reminds us so much of reddit, and obviously, of the three of those, you're going to spend the most amount of time in your feed. I'd only venture into popular/new when I want to discover new content once I've ran out of links in my feed.