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Comment by shahflow | Hacker News Reader

You can definitely view the feed chronologically as well. There's also notifications for things that you shouldn't miss. For the algorithm, we can use a variety of signals (post's content, relationship to author, interactions with groups and related posts) to surface posts we think are valuable for you to see first but definitely agree on the difficulty of building an one-size-fits-all solution. We're thinking through how to let users adjust their feed sorting preferences.

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It should default to chronological and give users full control over what they want to see. For example, give them tools to always show by keywords, topics, authors.

It’s work. The last thing you want as a worker is to miss something important that has real money implications. For social media, it doesn’t matter. For work, it does. You’re not optimizing for engagement like social media. You’re optimizing for communication.

Do not use an algorithmic feed. Seriously.

Some workers want to be baby fed information and don't want to go out of the way to learn something beyond their narrow scope. These employees can write a simple to-do checklist and as they go through their list of narrowly scoped tasks, they can cross each item out perfectly and nothing changes from what was expected. Why would they search for anything? Some managers love this too. Their employees will never deviate from the omniscient plan. Just feed them what they need to know, and secure your position (and time) by limiting access to information. Win win. Too much information and communication are time killers. How many organizations are really structured where employees can "miss something important that has real money implications"?

P.S. I agree with you

With all seriousness, if we give up on solving the problem we would like to see, and try to solve what decision makers see as their problem, providing feed management tools (also?) to managers probably would be an improvement.

> Some workers want to be baby fed information and don't want to go out of the way to learn something beyond their narrow scope.

And I think the entire world would be better off not catering to those people. Those are the people that make the rest of our jobs harder because they're so lazy. I don't care what they want. I want them to pull their weight or be fired. I have no desire to help them coast.

That what you are describing is (arguably) failing, is the reason this product is being built in the first place.

If you disagree with the premise, that's fair.

I do disagree with it. The moment this tool causes a communication problem is the moment the team loses confidence in it and stops using it.

I do like the thread + AI approach.

I'd love to talk to you about the software. ckluis [@ googles email].com

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