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Comment by RepressedEmu | Hacker News Reader

I actually was just thinking about this problem the other day in the context of active vs passive systems and customization. I used to use Reddit a lot and found it to be a powerful tool for finding things related to my interests but nowadays(post college) I'm finding it hard to justify the time waste of actively scrolling through for new things. I have started building a chatbot that will learn your interests and then actively bring you the best things it can find. Then you can tell it "Good job" or "I'm not interested in that" and it would learn over time what news sources our prefer, what topics you like, or even the average length of an article you prefer. I also think Reddit is powerful but can be difficult to set up for non-internet-nerds. Turning the initial setup of a custom "channel" into an active conversation might lower the barrier and help get more people access to the content they're craving.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!

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Interestingly enough, I just dropped Reddit this morning because of the active time waste it was on my life. That's why I asked this question.

Your chatbot sounds very interesting. It reminds me of Apple Music or Google Play Music where you tell it what kind of music you like and it recommends songs to you. I thought that kind of system works really well. I actually have the Hacker News Telegram bot set up as well that sends me the top stories if they break 100 points. I think a chatbot could be an interesting project to make for news and I would be interested in helping if you need some.

Right now I am just working on getting it to understand "topics" such as Technology, Science, Fun Facts, Business, Politics etc. and then use those topics to create a personalized channel that pushes you updates of the "best/hottest" stuff. Right now the topics are going to map to subreddits and news sites since the category data is there. Eventually I hope to add tracking for companies(or stocks), actors/directors, and bands/artists to add to the stream.

So you could just tell it "Hey can you keep and eye on Taylor Swift for me?" and it will know thats a musical artist and give you album updates or related news. Or "Track Hugh Jackman" and it will let you know when he is in talks for a new movie or whatever.

The next step after that would be getting feedback from the user about the different articles it pushes to them and then building some kind of intelligence into that data. Or just being able to say "Hey I'd like more tech and less science, please" and it would adjust the ratio accordingly.

Yes! I'm just starting with this idea using Rails and Wit.ai but I think it could have some legs and would love to collaborate with you.

email me at seanmgrahamnj at yahoo

Recommendation systems never seem to work for me, I assume I'm an outlier and my behaviors in respect to my interests is different from how most other people behave and that's why I get such bad results but sometimes I also just worry they don't work for anyone - based on some of the complaints I read.

This bot i'm building is less of a "recommendation engine" and more of a "customized web alert engine" where the customization interface is the conversation with the bot. Recommendation engines are a non-trivial problem that companies like Amazon and Netflix spend lots of money on and still don't get right for a lot of people(I have the same issues with both services-- Grace and Frankie Season 3 is not something i'm interested in Netflix, geez). People like us can make google alerts or use Feedly or setup searches for custom hashtags or a million other ways there are to create a personalized information stream. But many non-technical people have to settle for scanning a Facebook feed full of junk, fake news, and ads trying to find the best nuggets of what they actually are tracking. The bot aims to solve that problem and give these people some of their time back.

I'd love to hear any more thoughts on it.

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