Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

The way I see it, the primary thing to solve for any recommendation engine is to optimize for serendipity. I.e. allowing you to get information you didn't know you wanted.

This means basically also finding ex. articles that are not written by NYT.

Newspapers problem is that their primarily omnibus approach to whats relevant isn't really doing the waste amount of insightful information available that exist out there.

So the whole issue IMO with all newspapers/media these days. They are building silos where none should really exist and this is one of the primary the reason why people don't consider it valuable anymore.

View on HN

Maybe you had no idea but what you describe already exists in the form of native ads and recommendation widgets like outbrain. And here's what I do when I run into them: I rarely click them. When I'm on NYT, I don't want to click out to some "recommended" website that doesn't have high journalism integrity as NYT (Let's not get into a needless argument of whether that itself is correct or not). My point is, I disagree with your argument that "different source" has anything to do with serendipity. Also you say silo shouldn't exist but I don't see a reason why. Sure there are clearly cases where certain companies siloing up their user's data is bad for humanity, but in this case it doesn't even make sense (what even is "silo" in this context anyway?). People create silos because of demand. Imagine if NYT started opening up and let any random guy on the web write articles on their front page, what did they gain by "opening up" their silo? Most readers of NYT are there exactly because it's a silo that guarantees certain degree of quality. Once they start "opening up", you'll probably be the first to say "yeah New york times is done now, it's all low quality now"

I don't think we are talking about the same thing.

To get sense of where I am coming from i would like to refer to some of my writing on the subject.

http://000fff.org/#/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realt...

and

http://000fff.org/#/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter

It's about something slightly different than what you seem to imply, sorry if that was imprecise.

ThomPete is talking about categories as silos probably. Just like most people come to HN for mostly startups and programming, but stay for nautil.us too. And serenpidity here is refreshing.

His idea makes sense.

I agree with the serendipity part. When I read a publication of general interest, like the NYT or New Yorker, I don't want to keep reading their coverage on a specific subject...for example...the NYT is definitely capable of writing a great football feature story...that doesn't mean that I want a recommendation list full of NYT sports news stories; it just so happened that that particular football story touched on a lot of universal themes, etc. This is similar to the annoying predictions from Facebook's news feed algorithm: I'll like someone's baby photo to express that, hey, congrats on having a baby! But that doesn't mean that I want to see a flood of baby photos from that same friend as they go about documenting every minute of their newborn's life.

To your second point: how do you propose NYT do recommendation on external articles? That would require a database of external articles, for one thing...I'm not sure the results would be any better than what third-party link recommenders generate (e.g. Disqus and Taboola).

well I am not saying it would make them any more likely to survive, but they could just create access to external links just like Pulse and other newsreaders to it to all of them or like Google News kind of did.

In some ways that is what Facebook is doing right now and why they are gaining more and more ground on the news-front. It's also why Twitter is kind of struggling because it's only external things leaving twitter as a protocol rather than a news service.

The whole trick IMO is to find a way to construct a whole story so i might read some stuff from NYT but then get access to more in depth on some sub subjects other places.

But this all kind of assumes that one is buying the relevance of newspapers moving forward which I am not, but thats just me.

These silos are the foundation of their business. No news organization is going to have the resources to cover every piece of information on the internet, so they must specialize. The alternative to this model is to have one organization control news syndication for a large number of independent contributors. This is the intent of Facebook Newsfeed, but there's little incentive for news outlets to publish to it. No matter how much money Facebook gives them, they can make more by building up their own "silo."

Sure I am well aware of why they need to do it. But that need is also what is hindering them from providing actual value and why things like Facebook, Pulse, Twitter etc are popular news sources and newspapers aren't

Reply on news.ycombinator.com