Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Personalization Isn’t the Future of News (I Hope)

ownlocal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 30 posts

Re: Personalization Isn’t the Future of News (I Hope)

#3

Post by alextp »

In all honesty, reading this makes me want the writer to actually spend some time reading grocery store counter magazines or cosmopolitan, or even watching 5 straight hours of fox news or reality shows or whatever goes completely against his values.

Truth is, no one would come back to a website that showed them uninteresting things.

Re: Personalization Isn’t the Future of News (I Hope)

#4

Post by ducuboy »

Of course it is. No doubt we need news filters, or curation, because there's too much news for us to handpick. You can still do that but you're missing a lot of interesting stuff.

The discussion should be about the way filtering works. Of course you should not get what you "like", but what you are interested in. There's a subtle but big difference in that.

Re: Personalization Isn’t the Future of News (I Hope)

#6

Post by Gobitron »

ducuboy wrote: post #4

Of course it is. No doubt we need news filters, or curation, because there's too much news for us to handpick. You can still do that but you're missing a lot of interesting stuff. The discussion should be about the way filtering works. Of course you should not get what you "like", but what you are interested in. There's a subtle but big difference in that.

I'm not sure I totally agree. I think we are already possess the best filter that guides us generally to the news we want to read. What we need are better experiences from news apps and sites, and not someone else's idea of the perfect overall filter. However, I do think that better selective filtering will prove helpful. I wrote a blog post on this recently. http://goldbergfam.info/blog/2011/06/03/personalized-news-si...

Re: Personalization Isn’t the Future of News (I Hope)

#7

Post by wccrawford »

I use the 'recommended items' feature on Google Reader quite a lot. It does a good job of finding things I'd like, but also puts in a lot of other random stuff. (Which I occasionally like.) The more things I 'liked', the more random stuff appeared... (Probably because I have such a diverse set of interests that it just can't read me well.)

Re: Personalization Isn’t the Future of News (I Hope)

#8

Post by marknutter »

I've heard this argument before and I've never understood it. Would it make sense to suggest that we ignore the recommendations on Netflix because we'd be missing out on movies we know we wouldn't enjoy? Information overload is becoming a huge problem, and personalization is the solution to the problem, although the problem is a hard one to solve.

Re: Personalization Isn’t the Future of News (I Hope)

#9

Post by jasonkolb »

I think there's an important nuance separating "personalized" and "tailored". The personalization the article is talking about is mostly geared towards deciding which sources someone should see--do you want to see stuff from Drudge or HuffPo, for example. Imagine if Pandora only played stuff from bands that it knew you liked.

Tailoring a feed to someone's interest, however, is more like what Pandora actually does--learn "what" you like, not "who" you like. So I've discovered a lot of musicians that I would never have otherwise heard from Pandora, which rocks.

I think a tailored feed that keeps my interest and exposes me to new things that I'll actually be interested in is the best of both worlds.

Re: Personalization Isn’t the Future of News (I Hope)

#10

Post by ducuboy »

Gobitron wrote: post #6
ducuboy wrote: post #4

Of course it is. No doubt we need news filters, or curation, because there's too much news for us to handpick. You can still do that but you're missing a lot of interesting stuff. The discussion should be about the way filtering works. Of course you should not get what you "like", but what you are interested in. There's a subtle but big difference in that.

I'm not sure I totally agree. I think we are already possess the best filter that guides us generally to the news we want to read. What we need are better experiences from news apps and sites, and not someone else's idea of the perfect overall filter. However, I do think that better selective filtering will prove helpful. I wrote a blog post on this recently. http://goldbergfam.info/blog/2011/06/03/personalized-news-…

What are the best filters you're referring to? Btw, do you know http://zite.com? Besides filtering, it has topics. You might like that.
Post reply on HN