Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninjin | Hacker News Reader

What I want is a news aggregator like HN but where I can control (possibly have it learnt) how to rank based on network effects. Preferably in an interpretable fashion if any machine learning gets involved. Heck, I would even be happy for it to be partially probabilistic to get me to “read across the aile” at times.

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I've thought about that, however I worry about it turning into what Facebook does and put you in an echo chamber (with the occasional "across the isle" item thrown in to "make you angry"). But I still like the idea, just not sure what the best implementation would be.

Some ideas I've had include having multiple up/down vote buttons for different criteria -- one that says if you agree or not with the content, and another one that says if it is a well reasoned and interesting post. That way I can pull up things that people in my cohort think is a good post but also disagree with content wise. But this requires that people are reliable able to judge something fairly that goes against their view.

Then I'd like to see "bubbles" that show which cohort(s) I belong to and which other ones are out there so I can choose which to read at any one time.

"Aisle," both of you, like in the senate chambers.

It already is an echo chamber. Except that you have zero control over the content you see, so you're stuck in someone else's echo chamber. It can be really fucking frustrating, which is why I closed my main account after 8 years.

you're still here tho, so why close the account?

I don't really want to be here. This account will be gone too as soon as I close my browser. I won't make another one unless something very urgent comes up.

Slashdot moderation has this, with separate voting for insightful, interesting, funny, etc, and the corresponding toggles on the view side if you want to prioritize or exclude particular categories.

I always thought HN (or reddit, youtube, etc), with a Bayesian filter would be interesting.

I'm sure there's a good amount of obscure content that doesn't get appreciated because it never reaches the people that would enjoy it.

That's certainly the case but how would a Bayesian filter help?

So tiktok but for news?

Smart personalised and decentralised search with comment aggregation and sharing.

It shows you what you're interested in, not what adtech, or social media barons, or VCs, think you should be reading for your own good. Or for "engagement."

Something something echo chamber? Probably. But it's not as if we don't have those already.

You can already do that. Just click hide on posts you don’t want to see.

The issue with having a model that does it for you is that your going to immediately start fighting against it and its decisions.

Hate to be the stereotypical pedantic HN commenter, but fwiw this normally works, I believe there's an exception with Ask HN posts where clicking "hide" will not fully hide it, at least last time I tried.

Wait, have I been on HN since 2011 without realising this? There is nothing in the FAQ at least [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I have always avoid pushing “hide” since I assumed a new submission would pop up at the bottom and I never wanted to go beyond the top 30 as I feared I would stay on the site for a bit too long.

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