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> So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope. but there's an algo which is simple to implement and has very little b

> So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope. but there's an algo which is simple to implement and has very little biases: just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me. I don't want to see what's best for others, I don't want to see what some algorithm thinks is best for me, I just want to see what's last, with zero additional "reflection" on this.

dxbydt 5y ago
> just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me. heh heh. In the last 5 minutes, since you typed in your comment, there’s been 100 news clips. Literally. So just show the top 5 after reverse sorting by time….newest to oldest. Temporal order. Now what would be the problem with that ? Almost always, your newsfeed will end up dominated by the latest weather clip where the guy says “and now the temperature is a sunny 82 degrees”…meanwhile 100s of people die in ukraine but you didn’t see that because it was like an hour ago, and 1 minute ago >>> 1 hour ago.
- ailef 5y ago
  If you also allow the user to filter results with a search query then this shouldn't be a problem. If he wants to see Ukraine news he will search for that. If there are too many results, the query can always be refined by the user.
runako 5y ago
"Temporal order" is another way of saying "prioritize accounts that post most frequently, while suppressing less-frequent posters." That obviously rewards e.g. unnaturally breaking up content into multiple parts, content-light posting, and other consumer-hostile behaviors. I'm not sure why so many seem to think this is obviously optimal for consumers. "I'll unfollow the accounts that behave that way" doesn't work because a temporally-ordered system incentivizes all accounts to behave this way. An account that posts highly valuable content, but only posts once weekly, will not thrive in a temporal-only medium.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  This might be true for social media but for a news app, they control their own pace.
  - runako 5y ago
    This viewpoint underestimates a single person's ability to consume the output of a news organization. There are orders of magnitude difference between the number of stories that can appear in one's newsfeed and the number of stories produced bye a news organization in a day. One could roughly estimate that by the time a news organization grows to need a full floor of office space, its pace of production will outstrip most readers' ability to keep up and not miss important stories. A temporal feed makes "keeping up" important, as relevant stories will quickly drop off the feed due to newer stories having been published more recently. The reverse is also true: a curated feed allows readers to step away and not worry that they will miss something important. The pacing of news stories is dictated by a combination of the number of salient events occurring as well as the number of staff. To use a concrete example, the (already-shortened) Yahoo! Finance News for Apple has 11 stories published today. There are thousands of public companies, and relevant news is published every day about many of them. A temporal feed of company news on the Yahoo! Finance homepage would therefore not be very useful. The pacing is essentially outside the control of Yahoo!, since it is driven by events at thousands of companies.

dxbydt 5y ago

> just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me. heh heh. In the last 5 minutes, since you typed in your comment, there’s been 100 news clips. Literally. So just show the top 5 after reverse sorting by time….newest to oldest. Temporal order. Now what would be the problem with that ? Almost always, your newsfeed will end up dominated by the latest weather clip where the guy says “and now the temperature is a sunny 82 degrees”…meanwhile 100s of people die in ukraine but you didn’t see that because it was like an hour ago, and 1 minute ago >>> 1 hour ago.

ailef 5y ago
If you also allow the user to filter results with a search query then this shouldn't be a problem. If he wants to see Ukraine news he will search for that. If there are too many results, the query can always be refined by the user.

runako 5y ago

"Temporal order" is another way of saying "prioritize accounts that post most frequently, while suppressing less-frequent posters." That obviously rewards e.g. unnaturally breaking up content into multiple parts, content-light posting, and other consumer-hostile behaviors. I'm not sure why so many seem to think this is obviously optimal for consumers. "I'll unfollow the accounts that behave that way" doesn't work because a temporally-ordered system incentivizes all accounts to behave this way. An account that posts highly valuable content, but only posts once weekly, will not thrive in a temporal-only medium.

newswasboring 5y ago
This might be true for social media but for a news app, they control their own pace.
- runako 5y ago
  This viewpoint underestimates a single person's ability to consume the output of a news organization. There are orders of magnitude difference between the number of stories that can appear in one's newsfeed and the number of stories produced bye a news organization in a day. One could roughly estimate that by the time a news organization grows to need a full floor of office space, its pace of production will outstrip most readers' ability to keep up and not miss important stories. A temporal feed makes "keeping up" important, as relevant stories will quickly drop off the feed due to newer stories having been published more recently. The reverse is also true: a curated feed allows readers to step away and not worry that they will miss something important. The pacing of news stories is dictated by a combination of the number of salient events occurring as well as the number of staff. To use a concrete example, the (already-shortened) Yahoo! Finance News for Apple has 11 stories published today. There are thousands of public companies, and relevant news is published every day about many of them. A temporal feed of company news on the Yahoo! Finance homepage would therefore not be very useful. The pacing is essentially outside the control of Yahoo!, since it is driven by events at thousands of companies.