Hacker News Reader

Comment by webwanderings | Hacker News Reader

This is good looking. But, is this just a River of News scrolling, or do you keep track of "read" items to get them out of the way?

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That is an area that I need to improve. With a high focus on privacy, it makes it hard to track what users read without creating a user tracking system and that is something I really want to avoid doing.

The thread links use the CSS :visited selector to show the links in a different color to help identify the links you have previously clicked without the site knowing that information itself.

There is a history function for logged in members, but for user privacy it can be limited or disabled by the user via the Settings page and is also auto-purged periodically.

At the very least the site needs to show content that has been added since your last visit and that is something I plan to implement soon.

If you use localstorage you can track the state on the client.

I really try to avoid using local storage because it delves into potential user privacy issues. I will look more into it as well as other options as I know having a list of already viewed results would be helpful for users.

Have you looked into cuckoo filters?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo_filter

The problem is not really the methodology or implementation but the perception caused by it. If you can tell a user "we know you read this" then that implies you are tracking what they read which is something I try to avoid.

I plan to work on a solution, but if I do, users will be able to opt-in or opt-out depending on the implementation.

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