Hacker News Reader

Even just a really naive solution: offer me a view that shows only the most recent 2-3 updates for each project I watch.

That would solve about 95% of my problems with the news feed.

I'd love just the last update for each project. It's handy to use "Watch" as a sort of bookmarking tool.

And let me trigger an accordion to see the rest of the updates from that project, if there are any.

+1. Having users micromanage their commits to their repository because of fear of losing "popularity" is not the solution. Automation is the path to the future, let the computer aggregate the content for us and display a cleaner news feed.

Excellently stated. Up until a week ago, I was following around 200 projects on Github. I recently went through and unfollowed almost all of them (I think I left about 5-10 that I really care about). I did all this because the news feed had become completely useless for the reasons you describe above.

Yes. 100 times yes.

I think what I would like is a summarized view of the projects I am committing to. For instance "Cloudname/cloudname (5)" for "5 unseen updates for Cloudname".

And I'd like a different summarized view for the projects I am only following.

Don't even get me started on how broken the fork system is!

Really, the issue is that the news feed is broken.

Absolutely. I coded up a replacement using the GitHub API:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/10/node-miniapp-minima...

It broke when they changed the API, but by then I had found http://defunkt.io/dotjs, which allows you to execute any code in a ~/.js file for a given domain.

So I put $("div.news").hide(); in my github.com.js and instantly had a more relaxing, comfortable life.

I completely disagree with this part of your post:

Facebook has done a really good job solving the problems of information overload and would provide a good model.

But I do agree with these:

The most important step is to group updates from each project. Right now half of my news feed is comments on a single repository. Those should take up only one or two slots. The next step is to filter according to some metric of "interestingness."

My advice is do it and share the hack. I think the best way to find trouble spots in your UI is to find out what people are writing hacks to work around.

For the record, you will only get hacked work-arounds if your product is oriented at developers. Still, I'd rather spend time hacking on my projects than hacking on github's.

Thanks for mentioning dotjs! I didn't know about that project. Basically its greasemonkey but easier to use.