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I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories ad inf

by hpvic03 14y ago

I don't really see how news can be "personalized." News isn't personal, it's just "what happened." It can be separated into categories and sub-categories ad infinitum, and I could subscribe to those categories, but I can already do that by going to the news site I want, clicking on the sub-category that I'm interested in, and adding it to a feed reader. Thus, personalizing my news by auto-subscribing me to sub-categories that the system "thinks" I'm interested in doesn't really solve any problems that I have. The harder problem of news, in my opinion, is determining what's important and interesting and what's not. Time-weighted voting systems like on HN and Reddit do this very effectively. For example, I am generally more interested in the "Most Popular" articles on NY Times than whatever the editors chose to put on the front page. I would be more interested in a startup that tried to create a HN for another vertical, like the movie industry.

aero142 14y ago
There is certainly news I'm more and less interested in. I still think there is room for improvement over general voting systems like Reddit and HN. Something like weighting votes based on voting similarity between users. I don't know whether Prismatic will succeed but I think they are working on the right problem. I want the product they are trying to build, even if they aren't there yet.
- hpvic03 14y ago
  I get what you're saying -- you could assign a level of importance or interesting-ness to an article that would be different than other people's. I think adding a collaborative filter to HN or Reddit based on what you vote and view could actually work really well - that's a great idea. Maybe we could get Reddit or HN to try it. Any Reddit employees here? I'm assuming PG is too busy to add that to HN, but maybe he could open up the codebase to an ambitious programmer.

by hpvic03 14y ago

aero142 14y ago

There is certainly news I'm more and less interested in. I still think there is room for improvement over general voting systems like Reddit and HN. Something like weighting votes based on voting similarity between users. I don't know whether Prismatic will succeed but I think they are working on the right problem. I want the product they are trying to build, even if they aren't there yet.

hpvic03 14y ago
I get what you're saying -- you could assign a level of importance or interesting-ness to an article that would be different than other people's. I think adding a collaborative filter to HN or Reddit based on what you vote and view could actually work really well - that's a great idea. Maybe we could get Reddit or HN to try it. Any Reddit employees here? I'm assuming PG is too busy to add that to HN, but maybe he could open up the codebase to an ambitious programmer.