
Show HN: Idina, a customizable news aggregator powered by machine learning - idina_news
https://idina.com
======
devit
This seems potentially amazing and capable of replacing Google News and
Reddit, although it might a while to achieve that.

How is it ranking stories?

It might be worth considering trying to optimize placement based on number of
clicks and the time passing until the user goes back to using Idina (this is
slightly privacy-intrusive, but unfortunately browsers allow this if
JavaScript is enabled by listening for mouse move events etc., so might as
well take advantage of it).

The website could use thumbnail images for the articles, and more colors and
more contrast on the pages (have titles and clickable things stand out more).

It seems that most of the top articles should have a Reddit thread, but only
very few have links to Reddit; also could link to HN.

The popular/followed/customized UI seems quite confusing. It might make sense
to autofollow all defaults, and make "followed" the default and the current
popular be "explore other topics". Also, the default should probably be
customized, with the non-customized version being offered in another tab.

Might want a "since last visit" time range (which obviously needs to be
intelligent and ignore things like refreshes, maybe make it "since last visit
on day XX time YY" so the user knows right away if it makes sense).

Should consider removing the "star rating" from customization, which is very
hard/impossible to assign (is this worth 2 or 3 stars? how do I decide that?),
and instead let users customize by ordering articles (up/down arrows +
drag&drop), which is natural and easy.

Maybe consider copying Google News' click-to-expand mechanism.

~~~
gerner
I also struggled with the star rating, especially in my first few days. But at
some point I just got over it. After a couple of weeks using it I'm just
rating stuff without too much care and it seems pretty reasonable.

I think of the Netflix scale: 1 == terrible, never show me stuff like this in
this topic (I think this is actually their threshold for exclusion from a
topic) 2 == on topic, but but I don't like it 3 == this is OK, but I'd rather
have something else 4 == good, solid content I'd be happy reading just this
stuff 5 == wow, this is great, if it comes up it better be #1

@idina_news @_b can you confirm that ratings are _only_ applied in topic?
(they don't leak to other topics)

~~~
idina_news
Can confirm; ratings are per-topic.

------
gerner
I've been in the Idina closed beta for a couple of weeks. The #1 thing I like
about this is the power of "rate and refresh". The low latency feedback loop
is really impressive. Maybe I don't use enough news sites, but I haven't seen
anything like that before.

The breadth of content is pretty good. I was surprised I was able to build a
good gaming topic that's not just AAA titles or some niche category.

I'm a little worried about rating my way into an echo chamber. Having used
Idina for a few weeks, that seems like a risk. For example, 4 of top 6 stories
in my gaming topic are from the same site. I really like those stories and
that site, but I wonder if I'm missing stuff from sites I've never seen
before.

------
bfrog
Its a cool idea, and definitely one that has crossed my mind a few times. I
would guess you could build up common groupings of user preferences to try and
provide group content filtering/rating? If not, would be fun to try

~~~
_b
Agreed, moving towards collaborative filtering is a good idea. We have only a
few users right now, so customized categories is mostly content based
filtering and figuring out how to recombine the ranking signals for them. That
often work fairly well to improve topics (sometimes drastically), but mixing
in collaborative filtering seems like an exciting opportunity for improving.

Also hi, I'm Ben, and I worked on this.

------
webwanderings
This is pretty good. I am not a fan of any news website which does not provide
RSS, but yours is where it is not needed by design.

Now, if only I can increase the font size.

~~~
_b
Thanks!

What do you want regarding font? I'll make it happen for you. Would you like
an option to set the font-size for when you are logged in? Or is there someway
we could be doing our CSS differently so that zooming-in on our site meets
your needs?

~~~
webwanderings
I would really prefer being able to increase the font size. With age, I do not
enjoy reading anything with small fonts anymore (on desktop). I have also yet
to test your site on iPhone and my Android tablet.

BTW, I am a non-programmer and a type of guy who follow my own curated news
(hence a proponent of RSS). Your system looks closer to my ideals.

~~~
DanSmooth
Have you tried Ctrl and +, aka the browsers capability to increase text-size
if needed? Works nicely with this site (at least in Chrome/Win).

------
rw2
Curious what the machine learning is optimizing for and how this is different
from getting the most popular article from twitter

~~~
laotzu
Can't speak for this particular application but just off the top of my head
you could use NLP to aggregate news based on more complex queries. Instead of
saying "grab the most popular article" you could say something like "grab the
most popular articles that talk about both Hillary Clinton in a positive tone
and Bernie Sanders in a negative tone and is about the economy."

~~~
_b
You should be able to build that topic on idina. If you start with a search
for "clinton sanders economy," then communicate the "clinton good, sanders
bad" by rating examples of that high, and everything else low.

It is hard for algorithms to understand words like "data-driven political
journalism that is slightly left leaning," and, but easier to understand
"stuff like this couple of Nate Silver article." So for the short term, I
think we'll continue to need positive and negative examples to really get
topics good for people, but someday I'd love to figure it all out from NLP
parsing a general description.

------
est
My personal experience is that customizable is a great thing, however, it
might turn out to be an echo chamber if over customized. Too many familiar
contents, need more surprises.

also need a "hide" button. The most frequently used button in reddit was mark
a thread as seen by hide it, don't wanna see it again.

~~~
idina_news
The risk you're talking about re: echo chambers makes sense -- so far, we're
trying to mitigate the issue by making it possible to 'follow' both the
customized and uncustomized versions of the topic. Any other ideas are always
welcome.

'Hide' sounds like a really neat feature!

------
eecks
I am making a similar site right now

~~~
shabinesh
Any blog posts, refs on how you are building it? I am interested, I am also
making one for my personal use and hobby.

~~~
eecks
Hadn't thought of that. How far along are you?

------
DanSmooth
Some suggestions because I would like to use the site more often but right now
there is too much confusion going on (although I registered an account, which
was probably the least confusing part :-):

\- to get the ball rolling as soon as a new user has signed up, lead him to
one or two steps where he would pick some topics of interest of an alphabetic
sorted list and then to the "customized" tab, where you show him three stories
of a selected topic and explain what wonders the stars can do (problem with
the star imho: in many other applications it's often used to bookmark
something, which could be happening here; replace it with a simple "rate" and
in the dropdown have just three options: "Read [more], [same], or [less/fewer]
like this article.")

\- this "my" business gets confusing really fast; perhaps rename it to "topic
(customized)" so you also get the connection to the "customized" (perhaps
"personalized" is a better fit? It's also used already somewhere on the site)
tag; also how do I switch between "my" and the normal view? Edit menu should
have an option for this

\- more confusion: why can I only rate the first article (in the normal view
not the expanded one) and what defines what is listed at the top? Do you also
save sources, so I get more suggestions from the same source? If so, a better
view to see and rate articles might be in order. I might even would consider
adding an option to rate articles as well as stories. One could show that you
are not at all interested in a HP prequel but that you like articles from
perezhilton.com nevertheless.

\- in the popular tab: I can follow stuff easily but have to "edit" then
"unfollow" \- this might actual be a bug?

\- perhaps there is a technical reason for it but you seem to be afraid of too
much text. Instead of "X articles" write out what the user can expect behind
this link, like: "View 99 additional articles about this story" ("additional"
seems to be correct or else your counting is off) or "View all 102 articles
about this story" or even "View and rate 99 other articles about this story";
perhaps make it italic for same basic distinction

\- you already "open" new tabs when I select a topic-name but it is named
"search" (probably due to your underlying js-structure, where everything is a
search) and - you guessed it - it confused me. Why not rename it to the
correct name (e.g.: my:entertainment; or if you did go for some of my
suggestions: "entertainment (personalized)". Additional tabs for clicking
instead of scrolling to get to a topic might also be nice to have

\- that the search tab is removed if I select another tab is intrusive and
unexpected

\- unsorted feature suggestions: hide rated articles/stories as a setting for
users; sort by time; a huge topics page (popular ones at the top, less popular
ones at the bottom; both sorted by ABC) with an easy to use option (a simple +
at the right end of the topic link would suffice) to select topics; later on
suggest topics based on selected topics (yay, more data crunching); implement
a "stream"-view where instead of sorted by topics it's sorted by time just
using topics you follow

\- bug? when I remove a rating I get a 3 next to the star but there is no
actual rating

\- replace stars with hearts - have you not heard the news? I'm kidding with
this one

Sorry for probably confusing you too with my unsorted babble.

~~~
_b
Your feedback makes a lot of sense. Much of it we'll be turning fairly
directly into work items - so thank you for the guidance.

The two items you call out as possible bugs are, embarrassingly enough,
working as intended although I can see how the UX at those points is
sufficiently confusing that one might reasonably assume them bugs. For
instance, the rating showing up for an article no longer rated - that is the
predicted rating for the article. As you start to rate articles in a topic, we
show the predicted number of stars for all articles you haven't rated. This
can be useful to know (e.g. the ML learns the most from the manual ratings
that differ from what it would otherwise predict). The visual distinction
between these predicted ratings and your explicit ratings is that the star by
the number is filled in for your actual ratings. So the UX problem is that
there is no way to know that is what the filled-in / not-filled-in star means.
Anyway, will try to improve this.

Amount of UI text is tricky. There is value in both clarity and terseness, and
it's a balance I don't always get right.

The ratings are per-article, not per-story, so a rating dropdown guy for the
non-primary articles of a story almost certainly should be added. Excellent
point.

And sorry about missing the hearts over stars trend. We're hopelessly uncool.
Hell, we still love c++.

~~~
DanSmooth
"As you start to rate articles in a topic, we show the predicted number of
stars for all articles you haven't rated"

I'm not sure the average user would be actually interested in this, it might
even be bad to show them the "magic" at all because they might try to game it
and muddle their own results. He has the newest stuff you determined he might
like at the top and is good to go (the focus should be more on the articles
itself than on the ratings, although you need the ratings). More experienced
or technical-savvy users might be interested in it, so perhaps make it an
option to display this information if wanted.

Here is an idea so that you still get your ratings: What I have recently seen
on lichess.org is the occasional reminder to vote their training-games. You
should do the same. E.g.: If a user hasn't rated anything in a while. Or
perhaps display just a reminder every few visits to actually get the data your
tool needs to be better.

