

Ask HN: Why do people not like news personalization? - albion

Like many I am a bit of an information addict with my main sources being rss, twitter &#38; hackernews/reddit. It takes a lot of work to extract the decent information from all of these sources (probably about 10-15% of the information I receive is any good). The obvious solution to this problem seems to be applying a learning algorithm to create a personalized feed of news items. However I know there have been a few sites which have done this in the past with little success. Can anyone suggest any reasons why they have failed? Is it the implementations or that news personalization just doesn't work?
======
eklitzke
Personally, I mostly dislike news personalization. For instance, I always log
out of reddit unless I'm actually going to post something or add a comment,
because of the personalization issue. My selection of techy-related
aggregators like reddit and HN are enough personalization for me.

The problem for me with personalization is that it's annoying to always see
the same set of things. For instance, I'm mostly a Python programmer. But I've
found that if, for instance, I'm subscribed to the Python reddit, I get too
much Python-related content in my news feed. That's not really my focus -- I'm
really a programmer first, and a Python programmer second. I'd rather see
interesting programming things -- regardless of the language or focus -- than
I would in seeing Python-related content.

As anohter example, I've found the same is true with political stuff, which
I've mostly tried to handle using RSS feeds. I can subscribe to political
content that I'm interested in, but then I find that I just end up reading the
same things and viewpoints over and over again. I'd rather read political
content that's interesting and well written -- regardless of its political
stance -- than I would read political content related to some sort of
viewpoint or interest. That's the value of a "logged out" reddit/hacker news,
or the front page of a newspaper; I'll see the most important things first,
and then do my own seletion of whether or not I want to read the stuff
contained therein.

One interesting sidenote is that reddit basically dropped the personalization
filter thing a long time ago. You may recall that they used to have a
"recommended" articles tab, which was supposed to learn about what you were
interested in based on your voting history, and then by clicking on the tab
you'd see the top articles that it thought were relevant to you. AFAICT this
feature no longer exists, and now they just have the sub-reddits system where
you get a simple mix of content from subreddits you're subscribed to. I'm not
sure exactly why they dropped that (it never worked very well), but that might
be something to ponder a bit.

~~~
ggchappell
It seems to me that what is really going on here is that the personalization
is lousy. The point of personalization, one hopes, is to show you what you
want to see. But you say the personalized version does not do that. That being
the case, the personalization has completely failed. Which might answer the
OP's question about why people don't like personalized feeds.

On the other hand, it could be that you are upvoting not things you want to
see, but things you agree with. Tragically, many people do. In that case, it's
your own fault (or the fault of anyone who does such upvoting, and dislikes
the results); the personalization algorithm is doing it's best, but it's
getting bad data. And since upvoting based on agreement is so common, this
also might answer the OP's question.

------
_delirium
Some guesses:

One reason might be that the existing range of news portals is good enough for
most people to get approximately personalized content. People can find one or
more news outlets, aggregators, or blogs that more or less reflect their
interests, whether it's HN, Reddit/Subreddits, Slashdot, CNN, Fox News,
DailyKos, Lambda the Ultimate, or whatever, and they just read those,
supplemented with links passed on from their friends via Twitter/Facebook/etc.
So your market is the people who can't find any combination of those that
works for them, which maybe isn't a ton.

A different reason might be that Google News does personalization (via the
"Recommended" box), and so already captures a decent part of the market for
news personalization, at least in the newspaper-articles sense.

A third might be that it's hard to do well. To really catch on, people need to
rarely get articles they don't care about, and often have this feeling of,
"yes! this is _exactly_ the kind of news I want to read, and which I wouldn't
have found otherwise". That's probably hard to do! The Google News
recommendations don't really blow me away, for example, even though I've been
using it long enough that it should have decent data by now.

------
AnneTheAgile
I liken this problem to browsing a library or bookstore vs searching its card
catalog or asking for specific information. If I have a problem, I know what I
want and it may not be something I've wanted before. If I want to relax and
browse, I often want something different than I've wanted before.

So I think it is a hard problem, as said here, serendipity is hard to program.
However, I am absolutely sure we have not yet figured out the best way to
browse. Search seems pretty good, but internet browsing can easily be too time
consuming and aimless.

------
drallison
No shared context. You cannot say "Did you read the article in the NY Times
about XXXX" and expect that your friend, who you know reads the NY Time
(online of course) may have done so.

------
mikecane
It's not possible to can serendipity. No algorithm can make a leap like a
human mind, connecting two things that a machine would see as separate. This
is why I've never used any personalization. I don't want to see only what a
machine "thinks" I should see.

~~~
albion
True, the best articles are always the ones which take you in a completely new
direction. However I have also found that those same interesting articles are
often not very popular which leads me to think social news sites have their
flaws. Perhaps the solution needs to not look at what is popular/similar to
what you already like but rather new concepts (not that I have any idea how to
achieve that)

