Re:Dear Github, please fix the Watch-Button
by mindcrime on Monday February 27, 2012 @07:32PM
(#3641268)
Facebook's news feed has managed to keep the news feed relevant despite massive social changes in my lifetime Facebook usage (everything from high school, to college, to working as a professional software engineer).
Maybe for you, but my experience is exactly the opposite. I find the Facebook news feed to be just about as useful as the Github news feed... which is to say, totally useless.
The problem, as I see it, is that G+, Twitter, Github, etc. all make the same fundamental mistake... assuming that "connecting" to an "entity" means "I want to see every update from/about this entity." So, I "friend" somebody on G+ or "watch" a project on Github, now I'm on the hook to see all their updates. But there's NO particular reason to think that the above assertion holds. At best, "friending" a person or "watching" a project says you're more interested in it/them than a random project/person.
These "event stream" implementations really need one or both of two things: The ability to specify more about what it is you're interested in, and smarter ML algorithms to figure out what to show you, based on both declared (or, for that matter, inferred) interests, and social connections, OR the ability to specify filters to exclude "stuff you don't want."
If I had to choose, I'd ask for the latter. Better filters would go a long way towards giving us control of our streams / news-feeds. I'd like, for example to be able to say "I don't want any pictures of cats with funny hats, regardless of who posted them, in my stream." Or, in the Github example "I don't want any commits from project $FOO in my stream."
If I'd seen much (or any) evidence to suggest that the machine learning stuff was smart enough to give me a truly meaningful feed without manual tweaking, I would care less about filters, but so far I'm just not seeing it. Facebook appear to try, but my feed there is still full of crap because they assume too much based on who I follow, not what I'm interested in.
Maybe for you, but my experience is exactly the opposite. I find the Facebook news feed to be just about as useful as the Github news feed... which is to say, totally useless.
The problem, as I see it, is that G+, Twitter, Github, etc. all make the same fundamental mistake... assuming that "connecting" to an "entity" means "I want to see every update from/about this entity." So, I "friend" somebody on G+ or "watch" a project on Github, now I'm on the hook to see all their updates. But there's NO particular reason to think that the above assertion holds. At best, "friending" a person or "watching" a project says you're more interested in it/them than a random project/person.
These "event stream" implementations really need one or both of two things: The ability to specify more about what it is you're interested in, and smarter ML algorithms to figure out what to show you, based on both declared (or, for that matter, inferred) interests, and social connections, OR the ability to specify filters to exclude "stuff you don't want."
If I had to choose, I'd ask for the latter. Better filters would go a long way towards giving us control of our streams / news-feeds. I'd like, for example to be able to say "I don't want any pictures of cats with funny hats, regardless of who posted them, in my stream." Or, in the Github example "I don't want any commits from project $FOO in my stream."
If I'd seen much (or any) evidence to suggest that the machine learning stuff was smart enough to give me a truly meaningful feed without manual tweaking, I would care less about filters, but so far I'm just not seeing it. Facebook appear to try, but my feed there is still full of crap because they assume too much based on who I follow, not what I'm interested in.
<rant-over />