

Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale - shayan
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/11/techmeme-a-caut.html

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marcus
What we need is better recommendations systems based on your past activity,
instead of a monolith feed that is served to everyone.

It will be more relevant, less prone to tampering and manipulation.

~~~
shayan
there are apps that do that already, but I am not sure if that is even the
final solution... to give you an example, one day I wake up with a new idea in
my head, and all of a sudden I am interested in certain news that I never
found interesting before! and there might be some very relevant stuff there
for me, which will be filtered out since I wasn't interested in it before...

also it happens a lot that I find something interesting, but couldn't ever
find it based on my past history or interests (like some stuff I find here at
hacker news)...

also there might be some important news for the day which I want to know about
but is not necessarily what I always read about... for instance Amazon
introduced Kindle today, I might have not been interested in ebooks before,
but I would like to know about it, as it is the talk of the day!

so I guess the final solution might be a combination of all these, my previous
history, what other people talk about (techmeme), what other people with more
common interests as mine find interesting (hackers news), what the "wisdom of
crowd" chooses for me (reddit, digg) ... and what some of the people I find
interesting are talking about (my RSS reader)

but I guess if anyone can find the best solution here, they are in for a good
ride and big $s

~~~
marcus
I know most solutions that try to do it are pretty horrible.

I didn't say it was trivial but there is a very lucrative market here for
someone who successfully balances all these pressures, history over time,
current session, N closest peers etc and builds a good recommendation system
on it.

Until then our only real solution is to create and participate in niche
communities like this one.

------
shayan
"Everything on the Interent will be gamed. And user generated content won't
stay "user" generated forever. The pros will crash any party that's worth
crashing and make it their own. "

techmeme, reddit, digg and others are all great as long as we can prevent
users from cheating the system ... they kind of remind me of Yahoo and other
search engines in the early days which had very simple ways of ordering the
search results (and many took advantage and got better rankings for their
sites), and then came about the more complicated Google ranking with much
improved results (yes there exist SEO but half of SEO is to improve your site
as well, and you don't really get on top of the list really easily)

I think as time goes by _someone_ will find a way to make it harder for people
to cheat the system and give news that is more relevant

~~~
marcus
There will always be a drive to game the system, that is the greatest
advantage of small communities like this one a lot less incentive to game it.

But the problem is not exactly the same, Google still almost always gives the
same results to everybody (they are doing some experiments in personalized
search but they haven't rolled out these features).

~~~
shayan
yes you are right but none of the sites I mentioned are trying to give you
customized, personal news... I was mostly referring to them rather than the
customized version

And to be honest I am not sure if it is a good idea to go _really_ customized
based on my preferences, since I really think there might be stuff that I
_should_ know about, but I just have no idea what they are and someone or
something needs to point them out to me. But to be customized at a more
general level, would in fact give you what the current sites are (but are
doing a somewhat poor job at it as we mentioned). For instance, you come here
for startup and hacker news, and you go to techmeme for tech, and you could
find yourself on reddit for politics and so on. So to some extend they are
customized, since they are more focused, but not so focused.

Its all about filtering the noise, but thats very subjective, as any news on
Paris Hilton might be noise to me but must read for someone else!

