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Comment by Kluny | Hacker News Reader

It's probably irrelevant to HackerNews, but whatever. Thanks, it's exactly what I needed today. I've been telling myself to write clearly, directly, and in utilitarian language for so long that I almost forgot the love of language.

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>Irrelevant

Not quite https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thought: recommendation engine based on your upvote profile?

No thanks. I like knowing that everyone gets the same articles. It's like a newspaper where we are the readers, writers and editors. I'm exposed to good ideas because the rest of the community thinks they are worth hearing about. An algorithm might prevent me from seeing those ideas.

Agreed. I run into this on Reddit from time to time - I see lots of the things I'm used to and would have read in the past, but I don't see the unexpected. When I occasionally browse before logging in I discover that there's a lot I'm missing.

Vehemently no. I enjoy the unfiltered, random view and don't want somebody else deciding how to tweak the personalisation algorithm.

Right. The personalisation algorithms are one reason for Facebook and Twitter confirmation bias bubbles.

HN is filtered. The main page is a list of article which have been selected and upvoted by small unrepresentative subset of the population. I agree that it's not personalized though.

>HN is filtered.

Not relative to what everyone else is seeing.

Then click on "new" (it's only one click away), and you'll see everything that's submitted. If you change your profile to have "showdead" = "yes", you'll really see everything - even the stuff that's flagged or downvoted to oblivion.

What if the feature could be turned on and off (like with a radio button), so you could see both "views" (random vs. upvote history based), depending on your preference, or curiosity?

I personally prefer clickable thematic tags, which HN is already somewhat implementing with "new" and "show".

Ditto

Of course! I am so tired of seeing posts filled with microaggression, totally violating my safe space. Just make sure that recommendation engine doesn't brake, or horrible things may happen:

http://www.theonion.com/article/horrible-facebook-algorithm-...

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