This becomes suboptimal on a news site. I don't want to just see content that I know and is interesting to me, I want to read things I would have never have a c

This becomes suboptimal on a news site. I don't want to just see content that I know and is interesting to me, I want to read things I would have never have a chance of coming across otherwise. Of course, it is also impossible to read everything. This is why the voting system works so well. If many users find an article interesting, chances are that it will be interesting to everyone. This dynamic is increased substantially with a specific group like Hacker News. This is why I don't like personalised pages, they are only really feasible for things like google+ and certain types of searches.