Hacker News Reader

Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

It's broken for me in a different, far less important way. I can't get the darn "For you Recommended based on your interests" section to stop showing me stupid stories about dumb things I searched one time for 2 years ago. No matter how many times I've told it to "show me fewer stories about this" or "more stories about this" it's still news that's just total garbage. Singers, TV Shows, music, pointless crap I don't care anything about.

I search Google News all the time for stories on security, and books, and libraries, and it almost never recommends stories on things I'm actually interested in.

Kind of amazing just how bad that algorithm is. Really not a big deal, I'm just surprised at how bad Google can fail at something that seems so easy.

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I reported this bug when I worked at Google and tried to help the team fix it and they persistently ignored every effort. Still happens basically every time I search for a term in Google: it will show me articles about that for a long time no matter how many times I click show me fewer.

Google keeps actively making it worse and just ignores feedback from users. In the process, they've managed to make something that is worse than what it attempts to replace; I could throw away the Sports and other irrelevant sections when i bought a newspaper, but there is no way to remove or rearrange the priority of sections on Google News so I get sports stories every day despite not wishing to see any sports news.

I don't really know what's going on in Mountain View. Senior Googlers just lie or BS in response to questions questions from non-Googlers. It's pretty obnoxious.

News used to have a feature to customize your news sections, but it was dropped in a "UI refresh". Now all you can do is play whackamole to block the 99% of publishers that are crap, including the biggest news sites in the world, because even if they also carry quality news, the articles that make it onto Google News are the clickbait sensationalist opinion gossip trash pieces about how Twitter users responded to a Senator's comment about Trump's tweet.

I believe they killed the feature that let you block entire sections you aren't interested in. If I'm right, you must take sports news from Google News, it is not optional.

Customizing sources is pretty limited too. The Science section is full of pop-sci headlines, often exaggerated from studies, rather than just direct links to new journal articles.

RSS might be the better option here...

The Science section is full of pop-sci headlines

I wish. My Google News page is full of bullshit clickbait along the lines of "NASA WARNS 2 METEORS HEADING FOR EARTH, 1 WILL HIT YOUR HOUSE."

Seriously, Google, this is an embarrassment to your entire company. Either put some competent people on News, or shut it down.

>science section is full of pop-sci headlines

This is painfully accurate. The technology section is also bad, since no matter how hard I try to get Google News to show me technical/interesting content, it keeps recommending me banal stories of "the blockchain revolution", smart-phones, and video games.

Any suggestions for a decent RSS reader?

I've tried many RSS readers since the terrible day Google shut down GoogleReader, and i used to have at least 2 or 3 websites for my news: a RSS reader, GoogleNews for the top stories, etc...

In the end i was tired to have to switch between apps and websites to get my news, and was frustrated by Google News, not enough categories, not enough content sources...

So i decided to build a Google News/RSS Reader crossover that i could use to manage my RSS feeds, and check the Top Stories of the day, all of that in a single app. I added some processing on top of that to automatically cateogrize content, extract names of people, places, companies, etc...

It still is an early version, there's a lot of room for improvements and new features but i feel it's definitely going in the right direction.

You can check it out here: https://aktu.io/about

Would love some feedback!

This looks really cool! No public demo?

no demo, it is live: https://aktu.io

While the tt-rss community is a tire fire, the software is very good if you're happy to self-host.

i know its not an RSS feed but i really like TED talks.

https://www.ted.com/talks

try this too

advances.sciencemag.org/content/rss-feeds

I assure you it's optional.

Maybe I'm dense, but I'm not seeing how to do this. The settings available are pretty sparse. I'm logged in for sure. I've hidden espn, but I can't exactly hide every source that has a sports story.

Step 1: Don't patronize Alphabet directly. Step 2: Install an ad blocker. Step 3: Blacklist javascript from Alphabet-owned domains.

No it isn't.

This is why I don't buy any of the claims that "the world's elites" have developed AI technology that can predict what you want to buy/watch/listen 95%+ percent of the time. I've not seen anything that Google, Amazon, or Facebook have done that suggest that their recommendation engines are extraordinarily intelligent.

> It's broken for me in a different, far less important way. I can't get the darn "For you Recommended based on your interests" section to stop showing me stupid stories about dumb things I searched one time for 2 years ago

Have you ever thought that maybe the algorithm is correct and it's you that's broken? Google is a giant tech company full of AI ML geniuses and massive stores of customer data, it they're showing you those stores, they must have a good reason. /s

The Google News recommendations algorithm seems to have lots in common with the equally terrible YouTube recommendations algorithm. God forbid I watch one movie trailer in six months, now my recommendations are filled with terrible movie theory videos, and the awful bottom of the content barrel scraping some movie trailer explanined videos.

I suspect there’s a culture of entitlement at Google which results in laziness while people just sit back waiting for more options to vest.

There is a culture of not giving a shit about projects that have already shipped. Nobody makes level 6+ fixing bugs.

No, this stuff takes hard work to build. But the design choices are made by people with questionablle judgment who want to make their mark.

The probably optimized by some stupid stat that makes it look better on their report to show clickbait garbage

Both can be true. Entitled people and bad design can coexist.

But the sense of entitlement theory explains a lot of things about dumb, like brain-dead-level dumb, holes in many of Google’s services.

This is interesting, actually, I had noticed the same thing. I've been downvoting particular topics from their 'briefing' section and it seems to cause... well, nothing to happen. I asked, and they said it learns over time, but no matter how much you downvote something, it seems to do it anyway. Sigh.

Same. It clearly has me pegged as a Nebraska Cornhuskers fan. I am not, I have told them.... Google doesn't care.

That tag or keyword is just stuck to me

Let alone all the stuff I am interested in....but then I get actual or borderline fake news recommendations on that topic but clearly exist to quietly push a narrative about something else.

I gave up on it. The moment an AI or system can't even bother to filter what I don't like, why bother?

Presumably Cornhuskers are paying Google to stick that tag to you (eg by buying AdWords, G can ensure that ads increase traffic by routing traffic in other ways and pretending it's ads?)?

I looked into removing it because I got sick of seeing similar recommended stories over and over. It's always about WearOS for me... Can't remove it, so next best thing is I scroll pass it.

You can delete the related items from your account history or clear it altogether. It won't recommend them anymore and you can then mark the stories you are not interested in.

this feature doesn't work. I've done extensive work with this; "Show Fewer" doesn't show fewer (for example I am still seeing articles about Elon Musk and Tesla even though I've marked "show fewer" over a hundred times). Removing from search history doesn't really work either.

surprisingly youtube suggestions fixed that bias, I get a good ratio of interests / fluff these days

For me I get instant pot deals every day.

> ... I'm just surprised at how bad Google can fail at something that seems so easy.

Sounds like you still make frequent use of it, and use it to decide which news to read, which is Google’s goal. In that sense it’s not a failure at all.

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