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

Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 155 posts

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#51

Post by chockchocschoir »

dxbydt wrote: post #48

> Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user….They limit what a user sees…never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better I don’t know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv news app. That’s what I’ve done - written an algo that decides what news gets shown, in what order => implicitly means a whole bunch…

> Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.

I think that the common complain is not "it isn't showing what I personally want" VS "it isn't showing what people generally want" but rather that the algorithm is often not tuned to "what X want" at all, but tuned to "what brings company most money". For example, YouTube recommendations are biased towards channels that have monetization activated, as YouTube earns more money that way, while ignoring channels the viewer (at large, or personally) would enjoy more.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#52

Post by newswasboring »

dxbydt wrote: post #48

> Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user….They limit what a user sees…never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better I don’t know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv news app. That’s what I’ve done - written an algo that decides what news gets shown, in what order => implicitly means a whole bunch…

> what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.

This is a problem, but from a different point of view. The algorithm is trained not to give me news but to keep me engaged. That should not be the purpose of a news app.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#53

Post by shafyy »

I like that GitHub tries to make a better feed.

I like it because it could help me with my open source repos. 1) To reach new people and 2) notify existing stargazers that I've released a new update and 3) help me discover new interesting repos.

It remains to be seen if the new feed proves useful. But I wouldn't say that just because they use an algorithm it needs to suck per se. There's algorithm and there's algorithm.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#54

Post by jcelerier »

dxbydt wrote: post #48

> Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user….They limit what a user sees…never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better I don’t know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv news app. That’s what I’ve done - written an algo that decides what news gets shown, in what order => implicitly means a whole bunch…

> So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.

but there's an algo which is simple to implement and has very little biases: just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me. I don't want to see what's best for others, I don't want to see what some algorithm thinks is best for me, I just want to see what's last, with zero additional "reflection" on this.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#55

Post by andrew_ »

chockchocschoir wrote: post #29

> as users worried the recommendations were turning GitHub into something distressingly like a social media platform. Really users? This is news? I'll echo what I've said in another comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30769570 ) regarding GitHub being a social platform: > GitHub has always branded itself as a "social collaboration platform" rather than anything else (well, first "git hosting" but secondly…

I think it's fair to be surprised by curated anything on Github as that's not been their M.O. since I can remember, and I was a first-year adopter.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#56

Post by CornCobs »

eloisius wrote: post #6

I look forward to the quasi-spam slurry of infiniscroll feed crap once growth hackers start trying to game the algorithm to get more traction for their project. I don’t think you can introduce a recommendation algorithm without it having a negative effect on the content it’s supposed to aid discovery of. Pre-recsys, the content is made for human consumption, but once you add the recsys, the AI itself becomes part of…

Come on, if you never looked at any of the social stuff in Github I bet any new recommendation system isn't going to bother you either.

Unless they actively undermine their code/repo search functionality to push social stuff, let them do whatever they want for people who actually like browsing GitHub? (Not that I can imagine who actually browses GitHub)

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#58

Post by dxbydt »

jcelerier wrote: post #54
dxbydt wrote: post #48

> Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user….They limit what a user sees…never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better I don’t know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv news app. That’s what I’ve done - written an algo that decides what news gets shown, in what order => implicitly means a whole bunch…

> So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope. but there's an algo which is simple to implement and has very little biases: just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me. I don't want to see what's best for others, I don't want to see what some algorithm thinks is best for me, I just want to see what's last, with zero additional "reflection" on this.

> just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me.

heh heh. In the last 5 minutes, since you typed in your comment, there’s been 100 news clips. Literally. So just show the top 5 after reverse sorting by time….newest to oldest. Temporal order. Now what would be the problem with that ? Almost always, your newsfeed will end up dominated by the latest weather clip where the guy says “and now the temperature is a sunny 82 degrees”…meanwhile 100s of people die in ukraine but you didn’t see that because it was like an hour ago, and 1 minute ago >>> 1 hour ago.

Post reply on HN