Show HN: Idina, a customizable news aggregator powered by machine learning
idina.com
idina.com
How is it ranking stories?
It might be worth considering trying to optimize placement based on number of clicks and the time passing until the user goes back to using Idina (this is slightly privacy-intrusive, but unfortunately browsers allow this if JavaScript is enabled by listening for mouse move events etc., so might as well take advantage of it).
The website could use thumbnail images for the articles, and more colors and more contrast on the pages (have titles and clickable things stand out more).
It seems that most of the top articles should have a Reddit thread, but only very few have links to Reddit; also could link to HN.
The popular/followed/customized UI seems quite confusing. It might make sense to autofollow all defaults, and make "followed" the default and the current popular be "explore other topics". Also, the default should probably be customized, with the non-customized version being offered in another tab.
Might want a "since last visit" time range (which obviously needs to be intelligent and ignore things like refreshes, maybe make it "since last visit on day XX time YY" so the user knows right away if it makes sense).
Should consider removing the "star rating" from customization, which is very hard/impossible to assign (is this worth 2 or 3 stars? how do I decide that?), and instead let users customize by ordering articles (up/down arrows + drag&drop), which is natural and easy.
Maybe consider copying Google News' click-to-expand mechanism.
Like _b mentioned below, stories are ranked by ML fitting a bunch of signals and the article text to a user's ratings.
Usage metrics is something we want to figure out how to use well. Currently we track them, but don't use them.
Confession regarding images/colors/contrasts/etc: neither of us are UI people. It is something we struggle with, so doubly appreciate the feedback here. Will try to improve this soon.
Regarding some missing links to reddit, are there good threads on reddit we should be linking to for them, or has reddit just not picked them up? Our algorithms try to find every related reddit thread to a story, although they can make mistakes.
Regarding autofollowing all defaults -- it's tricky. We used to do this, and got feedback that people didn't link having to unfollow a bunch of topics when they created an account. Exactly how to package the experience is an open question, one that is complicated by the desire to have a good logged-out experience that transitions as smoothly to the logged-in experience as possible. Point being, you hit on a good issue here that we don't yet have a perfect answer to.
'Since last visit' time range sounds neat. Will look into adding.
Re: star ratings -- manually ordering articles (this should rank above that) or having up/down arrows for each article are also natural ways to provide ranking feedback. A big concern of ours here is the ability for a user to have a clean mental model of their own feedback over a long period of time. For example, feedback in the form of up/down arrows comes necessarily in the context of a specific set of articles shown at a specific time. If someone wants to review their feedback in aggregate, it might be difficult to represent it all in one place in a way that's easy to understand. On the other hand, your criticism of it is also correct. Adding additional ways to make training data, or changing how we do this, is something we are really interested in getting right.
I think of the Netflix scale: 1 == terrible, never show me stuff like this in this topic (I think this is actually their threshold for exclusion from a topic) 2 == on topic, but but I don't like it 3 == this is OK, but I'd rather have something else 4 == good, solid content I'd be happy reading just this stuff 5 == wow, this is great, if it comes up it better be #1
@idina_news @_b can you confirm that ratings are _only_ applied in topic? (they don't leak to other topics)
The breadth of content is pretty good. I was surprised I was able to build a good gaming topic that's not just AAA titles or some niche category.
I'm a little worried about rating my way into an echo chamber. Having used Idina for a few weeks, that seems like a risk. For example, 4 of top 6 stories in my gaming topic are from the same site. I really like those stories and that site, but I wonder if I'm missing stuff from sites I've never seen before.
Also hi, I'm Ben, and I worked on this.
Now, if only I can increase the font size.
What do you want regarding font? I'll make it happen for you. Would you like an option to set the font-size for when you are logged in? Or is there someway we could be doing our CSS differently so that zooming-in on our site meets your needs?
BTW, I am a non-programmer and a type of guy who follow my own curated news (hence a proponent of RSS). Your system looks closer to my ideals.
It is hard for algorithms to understand words like "data-driven political journalism that is slightly left leaning," and, but easier to understand "stuff like this couple of Nate Silver article." So for the short term, I think we'll continue to need positive and negative examples to really get topics good for people, but someday I'd love to figure it all out from NLP parsing a general description.
also need a "hide" button. The most frequently used button in reddit was mark a thread as seen by hide it, don't wanna see it again.
'Hide' sounds like a really neat feature!
- to get the ball rolling as soon as a new user has signed up, lead him to one or two steps where he would pick some topics of interest of an alphabetic sorted list and then to the "customized" tab, where you show him three stories of a selected topic and explain what wonders the stars can do (problem with the star imho: in many other applications it's often used to bookmark something, which could be happening here; replace it with a simple "rate" and in the dropdown have just three options: "Read [more], [same], or [less/fewer] like this article.")
- this "my" business gets confusing really fast; perhaps rename it to "topic (customized)" so you also get the connection to the "customized" (perhaps "personalized" is a better fit? It's also used already somewhere on the site) tag; also how do I switch between "my" and the normal view? Edit menu should have an option for this
- more confusion: why can I only rate the first article (in the normal view not the expanded one) and what defines what is listed at the top? Do you also save sources, so I get more suggestions from the same source? If so, a better view to see and rate articles might be in order. I might even would consider adding an option to rate articles as well as stories. One could show that you are not at all interested in a HP prequel but that you like articles from perezhilton.com nevertheless.
- in the popular tab: I can follow stuff easily but have to "edit" then "unfollow" - this might actual be a bug?
- perhaps there is a technical reason for it but you seem to be afraid of too much text. Instead of "X articles" write out what the user can expect behind this link, like: "View 99 additional articles about this story" ("additional" seems to be correct or else your counting is off) or "View all 102 articles about this story" or even "View and rate 99 other articles about this story"; perhaps make it italic for same basic distinction
- you already "open" new tabs when I select a topic-name but it is named "search" (probably due to your underlying js-structure, where everything is a search) and - you guessed it - it confused me. Why not rename it to the correct name (e.g.: my:entertainment; or if you did go for some of my suggestions: "entertainment (personalized)". Additional tabs for clicking instead of scrolling to get to a topic might also be nice to have
- that the search tab is removed if I select another tab is intrusive and unexpected
- unsorted feature suggestions: hide rated articles/stories as a setting for users; sort by time; a huge topics page (popular ones at the top, less popular ones at the bottom; both sorted by ABC) with an easy to use option (a simple + at the right end of the topic link would suffice) to select topics; later on suggest topics based on selected topics (yay, more data crunching); implement a "stream"-view where instead of sorted by topics it's sorted by time just using topics you follow
- bug? when I remove a rating I get a 3 next to the star but there is no actual rating
- replace stars with hearts - have you not heard the news? I'm kidding with this one
Sorry for probably confusing you too with my unsorted babble.
The two items you call out as possible bugs are, embarrassingly enough, working as intended although I can see how the UX at those points is sufficiently confusing that one might reasonably assume them bugs. For instance, the rating showing up for an article no longer rated - that is the predicted rating for the article. As you start to rate articles in a topic, we show the predicted number of stars for all articles you haven't rated. This can be useful to know (e.g. the ML learns the most from the manual ratings that differ from what it would otherwise predict). The visual distinction between these predicted ratings and your explicit ratings is that the star by the number is filled in for your actual ratings. So the UX problem is that there is no way to know that is what the filled-in / not-filled-in star means. Anyway, will try to improve this.
Amount of UI text is tricky. There is value in both clarity and terseness, and it's a balance I don't always get right.
The ratings are per-article, not per-story, so a rating dropdown guy for the non-primary articles of a story almost certainly should be added. Excellent point.
And sorry about missing the hearts over stars trend. We're hopelessly uncool. Hell, we still love c++.
I'm not sure the average user would be actually interested in this, it might even be bad to show them the "magic" at all because they might try to game it and muddle their own results. He has the newest stuff you determined he might like at the top and is good to go (the focus should be more on the articles itself than on the ratings, although you need the ratings). More experienced or technical-savvy users might be interested in it, so perhaps make it an option to display this information if wanted.
Here is an idea so that you still get your ratings: What I have recently seen on lichess.org is the occasional reminder to vote their training-games. You should do the same. E.g.: If a user hasn't rated anything in a while. Or perhaps display just a reminder every few visits to actually get the data your tool needs to be better.