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Comment by DanielRibeiro | Hacker News Reader

The personalization, although helpfull to filter out noise, can have some unwanted side-effects, as described on the Beware online "filter bubbles"[1]

Note that there are already tools that provide some personalization for Hacker News[2]

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

[2] https://github.com/fractastical/Hacker-News-Filter

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Actually the personalization is a great idea. But you'd have to not just apply filters but develop a complex recommendation system based on what you upvoted/read in the past. I.e. no more global front page for everybody but an individual one for each person.

But doing this requires quite some work (Machine learning etc.)

or simply have something like sub-reddits.

some sub-reddits are by nature very focused and high noise/signal ratio (/r/netsec is a good example of this), while something like /r/funny will have multiple posts that won't appeal to everyone. Definitely something that can be done better.

I would like to simply have the option to permanently hide stories, see a list of hidden stories, the same for marking them as favourites (so people who care about a submission can more easily carry on the discussion for a bit longer than the brief time it's on the front page).. and then be able to collapse comment threads and remember their state (save it in local storage), and the option to sort comments by date, maybe mark new ones since last visit lightly. I.e. I don't want an echo chamber as such, but some tools to not have to wade around things I already saw and don't further care about would be awesome.

So is it filter bubbling when content from People Magazine is kept from entering the pages of The Economist?

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