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Comment by ubac | Hacker News Reader

A question for you (and everyone): how important do you think it is that the algorithmic discoverability be married to a single platform/aggregator? What if you just had better algorithmic discoverability across all writing on the internet, regardless of where it's hosted?

I get that that would miss some of the benefits you mention (shared comment logins for example) but I'm wondering if people think it would capture 80% of the same benefits or, like, <50%. And I don't think for the discoverability to work there's any innate reason it has to be restricted to a single blogging platform.

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Personally, I've started seeing algorithmic discoverability as an anti-feature that mainly serves the interests of the attention economy.

For my part, I want more long-form, thoughtful articles that offer an enriching read. Not only have we got a good decade or two's worth of experience showing that no algorithmic discovery system ever favors that kind of thing over content that's morally equivalent to Five Minute Crafts, but I've got a couple decades' worth of experience telling me that, since long-form bloggers tend to link each other quite a lot, never needed an algorithm to help me with discovery in the first place.

If I want anything, it's algorithmic filtering: Take the feeds I'm already subscribed to, and filter out the stuff that I tend to skip over without reading. Because my blog feed already delivers me a couple hours' worth of reading a day, so I can afford to be choosy.

Yeah, this is very true. I may have overstated my initial idea. When I think more about it, maybe what I'm looking for is handcrafted curation, but that let's anyone share their curation speccs and discover relevant things to curate from. To me, that suggests some kind of algorithmic component, maybe in the form of search, voting, etc., but I wouldn't necessarily want the whole thing driven by either machine or mob.

Like stitchfix, but for magazine articles, blog posts and books. I might be cynical, but I think humans do this much better than any algorithm I've ever seen. :)

For myself, I usually read in two "phases". I collect material from sources that are usually high quality for me, and do some superficial skimming to trim out the content I don't particularly care for.

Later, when I'm more "in the mood" or have a long period of time, I pop() and read(). The stack gets pretty large at times, but it only takes a couple days of vacation to blow through most of it. If I pass over something in the stack enough times, it gets free()'d.

I don't know if I'd trust an algorithm to do either of these stages for me. I'd trust an algorithm provide input to phase (1), but never to replace phase (1).

> If I want anything, it's algorithmic filtering: Take the feeds I'm already subscribed to, and filter out the stuff that I tend to skip over without reading. Because my blog feed already delivers me a couple hours' worth of reading a day, so I can afford to be choosy.

I think that Newsblur does this.

"All writing" is probably too broad, but I think there's an interesting "meet-in-the-middle" solution where the site is a kind of syndication machine that is creating traffic between separately hosted blogs.

I appreciate people wanting to own their own writing, having permanence of data assured, etc. so this is probably worth thinking about. At the same time, many outside the tech world don't want the overhead of hosting or setting up their own blog.

I wonder if a hybrid would be best? Host yourself option or host-by-us option, with a pricing structure that accords.

The point is really to maximize ones ability to traverse between writers on subjects that interest you, so the physical location of the data is secondary.

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