Slashdot Mirror
Most Readers Don't Like Customized News
An anonymous reader writes "Despite the push by organizations such as Google and Yahoo!, a recent study found not everyone is a fan of web-based customization for news. The researchers defined customization as when the user gets to choose specific topics to read on a daily basis. Instead, some prefer personalization. This is when the system chooses content based on a reader's past choices. 'The obvious assumption is people would like more control over what they read,' Sundar said. 'We found when it came to evaluating new stories and quality of content, customization was the preferred method for power users. If you were not a power user, you wanted the system to tailor the news for you.'"
It's selection bias. I intentionally visit salon.com and foxnews.com back-to-back to make sure I've covered both extremes.
I have no problems with personalisation, which I take (based on the article's pretty unclear description) is where the system tries to predict news stories based on what you read in the past. However, I do have problems with the personalisation algorithms used. I get useless news articles that I would never have actually read, while the system hides stories I might actually be interested in.
Until the personalisation algorithms used by news sites surpass my ability to filter news that I read, I'll probably not use any sort of personalised news site.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Why does the title "Professor of Communications" sound like "Bullshit Artist Extraordinare" to my ears?
People love personalized news. Most folks I know get their news from Google News or other customizable news aggregators for just such a reason - it is a digest that you can edit so you are only seeing stories that matter to you. For example, I don't care about sports or entertainment. Lindsay Lohan's trials and tribulations, and big 'roided out athletes beating their mammas, are just not important. I also do not enjoy getting AP or Reuters news - neither can really be trusted after all their fuckups and propaganda plants. However I do enjoy getting news from abroad and Google lets me do this.
Professors of Communications are the people we can blame for the sorry, shabby state of the media today. Infotainment is the name of the game thanks to these bastards and their corporate overlords.
I've found the "Recommended Items" tab in Google Reader to be spot on 97% of the time. It takes time for it to get smart, but any system does.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
I had to read this article, rather than troll about GNOME 2.32.0. Bastards. And I'm not just referring to the GNOME developers.
WTF is a "power user"? Is someone selling illicit forms of "power" and I'm just not aware of it? Is this just someone who actually does more than click on the website to read their content? What sets a power user (as far as news-reading is concerned) from your "typical" user? Sounds to me like a lot of bullsh*t buzzwords to merely say that most people will choose to read whatever they want to read -- like a real newspaper. I don't read every little article written -- just whatever catches my fancy.
"Not every one is a fan of option x", "some prefer option y".
Different people prefer different things? This is truly revolutionary news. Quick, someone make more than one flavor of ice cream!
my first thought was "of course, people don't want to have the topics of the news they read manipulated, they want to get samples from everything current!". I guess I should stop overestimating them.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
it fouled up my reading to no end. From the different layouts to it choosing stuff it thought I wanted over others. I prefer the old version much better. I am more likely to visit sites like DrudgeReport which throw it all up there and I pick and choose with ease instead of trying to figure out where something I might want to read went. I bounce between CNN/FOX to get all the stories afterward and then back to google's news collector.
Its getting to the point where my local newspaper's website, with its lack of customization is much more readable. With customization I am never sure what I miss.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"If you were not a power user, you wanted the system to tailor the news for you." This is why we read Slashdot, no?
I read the news to know what is news as much as to know what is going on.
If I am reading what someone / a recommendation engine thinks I want to see, it defeats the purpose of feeling out the pulse of the public. If I want something different, something tailored, I will seek it out by joining a community such as slashdot, identi.ca or some other community that curates information for me. I go to the Nytimes, CNN and to google news to see the IE6 / windows 98 version of the news, so I can tell what the hell my silly relatives are seeing. Stop trying to talk to me, talk to the frigging public, don't worry I will get the message.
Give me everything according to what's currently generally newsworthy
Except, leave out:
- Celebrity, Paris Hilton (the person, not the building)
- American Football, Basketball, Baseball, Car Racing
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I don't use any of the customization or personalization features of the news sites I visit, simply because to do so requires me to be tracked by the site, and I don't wish to provide ANY site with any more data about me than I must.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'd be pleased just to get rid of all the anonymous commenting on most news sites. The level of nastiness leveled by pretty much anyone commenting on sites like Yahoo News is just mindblowing. Anonymous web commenting has gotten so out of hand, someone even made a firefox plugin to filter it!
First, give me stuff that will affect all of humanity for a time period of 50 years or more,
then, stuff that affects everyone everywhere for about 5 to 10 years
1-2 years
then getting more local (my nation or region, my city or local region)
I should be able to flip which is more important, the effect-time or the geographic scale,
and be able to flip the order I care more about in terms of local, state, national, regional, global
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What I got from this is that people DO like customized news, but they are too lazy to mess with settings or subscribe to rss feeds on their own. They want the system to decide, based on viewing history, what the user is interested in. Laziness at its finest.
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
Seems that personalization uses some sort of Bayes slope and eventually all the "choices" that I make on what to read ends up in the Entertainment section somewhere because I clicked on a link for Linux kernel and because Lady Gaga wore a carmine fez one day, my news feed starts showing content related to Twilight premieres in France.
I have keywords ("camping hiking" "restaurant review broward" "heather graham") because that's the only news I care about. So far so good...
Slashdot is about the only news I will read anymore because it has a minimal amount of political and entertainment news, the two things I could really care less about, and the comments I find are very entertaining. I had set Google News, at one point, as my home page but not being able to remove categories is a very big negative. Not all of us care to feel manipulated by article titles written to inspire hatred, greed and ignorance. So now I bounce back and forth between Slashdot and HappyNews.com lol Ahhh yes, ignorance, to a point, is bliss!!
Sure. How about garlic?
I don't think I like the idea of computerized customization of what news I see. I think for real news, the question shouldn't be "is this a topic I'm already interested in?" because maybe you'd be interested if someone informed you about it. The real question is, "Is this important?" I don't see myself ever trusting a computer very far in determining what's important.
Of course, the problem is that the people at news organizations are also doing a terrible job of determining what's important. News organizations are focused on things like Farmville, Lindsay Lohan, the newest viral video to become a big hit, and the latest Twitter buzz. Honestly, even if you do care about those things, you probably shouldn't.
Not that they should prevent you from learning about these things, or even completely fail to cover them, but I feel like media outlets are really failing to keep a sense of priority and a sense of perspective.
Essentially, everything I'm really interested in, I will already be aware of on a given day, as I have numerous sources that are checked frequently. What I want to know as a news consumer is what the broad spectrum of new readers knows. That said, I can certainly appreciate that people who are interested in (for example) Britney Spears need a place to get constantly updated linkage to that topic.
I think having the system automatically personalize your news based on prior viewing history is bad for society. Right now in both Canada and the U.S.A. there is increasingly extreme polarization between conservatives and liberal (R versus D in the 'States). Granted people view what is of interest to them but when they are served ONLY news pages based on the articles they normally view, they never get the chance to see a different view point. Sure they can search for it if they want, but out of sight generally means out of mind. This can only lead to increasing polarization.
I believe one of the insidious dangers of the web is that it allows people to not only associate with those of like ideas, but to focus those ideas/ideals. science fiction author Gordon R. Dickson explored this idea in his Dorsai books. His idea was that if man were to be able to migrate to different star systems, those with like minds would choose to locate together. In his books, there ended up being planets of mostly agnostic scientists, mostly philosophers, religious fanatics, etc. And all with strong feelings towards their own doctrines. As they isolate themselves, the stronger their ideologies become. I see the internet facilitating this on our one and only planet and within countries, and often pan-nationally. People with like interests form groups on the internet, associate with proportionally more people in those groups on the internet, and become very entrenched in those ideas (i.e. closely interact proportionally more with internet friends than than they would with real people they meet in the 'real world') . Before the internet we had no choice but to interact only with real people who generally had a wider range of ideas and ideals.
While the internet is generally a good thing, I think the biggest danger of it is the polarization of society. Helping people to only see one view point is only contributing to this negative aspect. I wonder if it would help to instead of only choosing similar news viewpoints to what people normally look at, to make sure the system automatically presents at least a few news stories reflecting something different. i.e. Provide choices of what people generally view, but always show a few alternatives so that perhaps they might choose them occasionally and the system doesn't spiral the viewer into say radical right or radical left wing only ideologies in the news that is presented to them.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Reading only what you want to read is a good road to go down to eventually become a closed-minded bigot. It used to be you had to work hard to avoid exposing yourself to facts you don't like, but these days we have computers that will do that for you. Cognitive dissonance will be rendered a thing of the past, so that we may more easily group ourselves into extremist factions and ignore reality. It's all so wonderfully efficient.
"you wanted the system to tailor the news for you"
End of story. Holy shit who would have guessed.
That's probably why I've used drudgereport.com for about the last decade as one of my first sources of daily news. This is despite thinking he and brietbart are a bunch of dirt bags. The site almost always something interesting to read between the slant.
You're misguided to believe that foxnews.com and salon.com are opposite extremes, between which you will find the reasonable middle ground.
When someone tells you to jump off a 200-foot cliff, and someone else tells you not to jump of a cliff, you apparently compromise by jumping off a 100-foot cliff.
I have an iGoogle page with a number (25 at the moment) of selected RSS feeds in boxes (but no hamster gadget). Several of these are news feeds (general news, NY Times, BBC, Al Jazeera), some are tech (slashdot...), others are just interesting stuff (metafilter...). I guess this is customization (as opposed to personalization) and it works for me.
I used to have Google News open more or less permanently in a tab, but since their new look this summer, it has become less than useful for me and I don't think I've looked at it more than twice since they changed it (once was just now to see if it had become any better). I suspect this was personalization. (Well and twittization with the "popular" cruft and adization with the "spotlight" cruft.) To echo that New Yorker cartoon - "I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it."
The anonymous comments are usually the most honest, and truly reflect what the poster is thinking, even if the views expressed may hurt your fragile emotions.
It makes perfect sense why people might get "nasty" regarding certain topics. In such cases, there's usually a serious problem at hand.
Take software developed in India, for example. When that topic comes up here, you'll probably see comments you consider "nasty", posted by "Anonymous Cowards". If you actually bothered to listen to what was being said, you'd understand the very real problem of Indian-developed software being extremely shitty.
I beg to differ; millions love having customized facts!
Why make people chose what they want when it would work better the other way round? Just give us a block feature that works like Facebook - mouse over an article and an X appears over a corner, and when you click on it you'd get options like 'Hide this article', 'Hide this author', 'Hide stories about football', 'Hide stories about sports'. No longer seeing crap I will never be interested in, yet not narrowing content to just what I pick, that would make me a pretty happy reader.
See title.
I will admit, though, as far as all of the things ISPs and other entities track, news preferences are noticeably lower on the chart. Still...
(((dB)))
digg are you listening?
It's the stuff that matters.
. I want 20 subjects for my customised news, not 5.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
I dumped Google News when every story even tangentially related to US politics began to sport a snarky, propagandistic headlines provided by Fox News or their related ilk. But give me the option to completely weed out the scumbag sources of 'news', and I'm back in a heartbeat.
This link was 3 below on my rss feed: Facebook exec: All media will be personalized in 3-5 years
it's practically a design pattern in political rhetoric
Instead of filtering in a way that makes assumptions about what I do want to read and basing selection criteria on that, why not simply allow me to filter out what I don't want to read? Google has figured out that I like reading stories about what happens in my locale, but hasn't figured out that I don't like reading about the "professional" sports teams in my area. It tends to crowd out news about things I'd like to know about (e.g., that chemical spill that happened yesterday) in favor of $AMERICANFOOTBALLTEAM and $BASEBALLTEAM news. There generally isn't a way to enumerate all of the things I might want to know about; I wouldn't have listed "chemical spills" as one of those items. However, listing what I don't want (sort of an "anti-star" in Google tagging parlance) is simple.
I'm a bit OCD, and I subscribe to over 100 RSS feeds to get all my news. My biggest complaint is that it's hard to filter out the irrelevant articles from the interesting ones, because most sites only have one feed and I can't filter by tags :(