Back during the five-or-so years that I read slashdot regularly, I grew to wish that Jon Katz stories weren't there, so I used slashdot's (simple) filtering mechanism to make it so.[1]
Therefore, a feature request: If a large fraction of HN's users hit the "Not Hacker News" button, then the site should use some clustering technique (k-means or whatever) to identify groups of users who agreed[2] on what was on- or off-topic and filter accordingly (for those users). The idea is that if enough of the users to whom I'm similar decide that something is off-topic, then HN auto-flags it for me. What I'd really like is these articles filtered out automatically; then, if we wanted to get fancy, provide a "Show 4 probably NHN articles" link that turns the feature off temporarily.
[edit:] In particular, people who didn't use the NHN button would see exactly the normal set of stories.
But then HN becomes a baby recommendation engine, which could be a nasty path. Just thinking out loud.
[1] I bear no particular ill will toward Mr. Katz; just thought most of his stuff was neither news for nerds nor stuff that mattered.
[2] "Users mostly agreed" means the overlap between the sets of NHN-flagged articles is similar.
Therefore, a feature request: If a large fraction of HN's users hit the "Not Hacker News" button, then the site should use some clustering technique (k-means or whatever) to identify groups of users who agreed[2] on what was on- or off-topic and filter accordingly (for those users). The idea is that if enough of the users to whom I'm similar decide that something is off-topic, then HN auto-flags it for me. What I'd really like is these articles filtered out automatically; then, if we wanted to get fancy, provide a "Show 4 probably NHN articles" link that turns the feature off temporarily.
[edit:] In particular, people who didn't use the NHN button would see exactly the normal set of stories.
But then HN becomes a baby recommendation engine, which could be a nasty path. Just thinking out loud.
[1] I bear no particular ill will toward Mr. Katz; just thought most of his stuff was neither news for nerds nor stuff that mattered.
[2] "Users mostly agreed" means the overlap between the sets of NHN-flagged articles is similar.