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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

> It is time that we turn our back in the collaborative filtering algorithms that made social media a hellscape and embrace content-based filtering.

Except people deeply care about what other people are doing.

That was the whole point of Google’s Pagerank algorithm.

So, it might not be what you personally want. But to a lot of people, it’s more important to read/consume something popular (ie. that a lot of others care about), rather than something related to their own interests.

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Further in community like HN, it’s not just about collaborative filtering to find things that you as an individual will like. It is about focusing the collective attention of the community on a small set of topics to drive rich discussions.

  >So, it might not be what you personally want. But to a lot of people, it’s more important to read/consume something popular...

Count me in the "don't care" group. Which is why I always browse HN by "New" [0]. I neither know nor care which stories have been voted to prominence on the default frontpage, nor how this ranking has been determined. I just want to see what's new and select for myself what looks interesting.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

I would suggest that one of the reasons you find the submissions on the New page valuable is that submitters are actively seeking out stories they think the HN community would upvote. So the content of the New page indirectly reflects popularity within the HN community.

Not really. There's a hell of a lot of wading through junk, when you browse HN by "New". So much so that I maintain a special uBlock filter list to weed out a lot of crappy domains and keywords.

That's one advantage of browsing by the default frontpage: your fellow HNers have pre-filtered what ends up there, for you. It's also the disadvantage.

A good system uses both but it's not trivial to blend them. My system is right now showing me maybe 30% of what it ingests, if I was seeing just 3% I'd have to cut back more harshly and a popularity score would help. Fundamentally a popularity score has a much larger dynamic range than a relevance score.

Google has both a document-query relevance score plus a document quality score.

I've heard from a lot of people who like reading HN from a comment-centric point of view and I tried feeding all the comments into my system and it was really too much. When I fed in high-scoring comments, however, I like the results. I had somebody suggest comments from Metafilter and I think that could be a winner but of course comments have a network structure of relatedness to other comments and the submission that a comment-oriented reader could take advantage of.

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