http://hn-filter.appspot.com/#preset=AngularJS didnt spend much time but appears to be cookie based as this didnt work just by changing the preset in the url but opening in a different browser seemed to have taken the filter
You can add more keywords in the match function if thats what you meant. Anything more sophisticated should be coded as an extension / userscript rather than a bookmarklet.
Or better yet, a simple userscript. That way a single script could be run on all modern browsers with a couple of small tweaks required for the big 3, and easily installable out of the box on Opera and Safari.
Not a bad idea in the geekier circles, but the idea of installing something that supports userscripts and then installing userscripts isn't an obvious step for many users, whereas Google pushes Chrome apps and extensions quite heavily as an easy thing to play with.
Or personal scoring and coloured thread titles to suit. This isn't about the HN ranking mechanism, it's about finding and highlights article titles that might be interesting to the user.
In my case it really is about filtering, though, rather than discovery.
I like seeing things I wouldn't specifically choose to see, but I know if it has 'bitcoin', 'snowden' or 'CIA' in it, it's almost never going to appeal to me.
But yeah, if it was generic enough, such a thing could be used to highlight or hide, appealing to both approaches.
So the upvote system is broken then? The users on this site upvoting the articles to the frontpage are not upvoting articles they actually care to read about?
1) Only about 10% of HN readers have an account, thus many people do not have any voting or flagging rights at all.
2) The difference between making the front page or not making the front page is a few votes in a short time frame. A tiny number of people interested in a topic can easily skew that.
3) Not enough people visit new to upvote great content, comment on good and great content, and flag things that don't belong here.
4) Not enough people down vote comments that don't belong here.
Allowing people to filter articles makes HN a nicer place for those people. It's concerning that they may stop flagging articles that really don't belong here. Some of the Snowden articles were just pure political nonsense, with heated pointless threads.
Point 3 struck home. I've changed my textexpander snippet to take me to newest rather than the main page. Though I never get peeved at what is on the main page, I now wonder what I've been missing. Thanks.
I can't downvote anything, despite my account being active for more than a year. I would most definitely downvote a lot of stuff, but HN just won't let me.
The heart of your complaint is that you don't agree what people are upvoting is 'good and great content' - either from not registering to vote, or by voting for things you don't like.
That is completely subjective and does not mean the 'system is broken'.
Yeah, that'd be a perfectly reasonable claim. Upvotes (/flags) are a community measure and it's possible for the dynamics of the community, as moderated by the software, to result in the presence a bunch of Bitcoin articles which are only of interest to a subset of the readers, and a recurring annoyance to others. So why not have filters?
Heck, if all were right in the world, we wouldn't have Hacker News as a website per se, you'd have a Hacker News as some sort of "news group" cough on a standardized protocol, and you'd have client software that could filter that sort of thing for you automagically. :P
Observing that Hacker News is using a collaborative filter and that bitcoin articles frequent the front page, one might be forgiven for concluding that bitcoin articles might be popular with the audience.
The poster wasn't hand-wringing and complaining "There shouldn't be Bitcoin articles on HN", but instead took initiative and created his or her own filter to have a HN article list closer to what he or she wanted.
It's reifying my desire to finish a Chrome extension I made a while ago that will blog any post on any "social" websites (HN would be one) that have certain keywords for certain periods of time.
That way, you could block live trends like "The Bachelor" you don't care about, or permanently block mentions of things you never want to see, or just temporarily "unfollow" someone.
I built the blocking but not the timing.
ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT ME this is cool. I like Bitcoin, will not use, but I'm 100% on board.
A reverse-filter would be nice too - I'd like to see only Bitcoin articles, as the ones posted here tend to be much more interesting than ones that hit r/bitcoin
Someone should generalize this to a filter which removes articles discussing any of the n most important technological advances of our time. Why just make it for n=1?
It's either not case insensitive or matching parts of words, as it didn't filter this: Bitcoin?s roller-coaster ride gets wilder as Wall Street, China climb on (arstechnica.com)
