I have switched back to the Latest tab, since if I get shown old stuff I’ve already seen, I want it to be because people are talking about it in an interesting way, not just because people are clicking on it.
EDIT: But I appreciate the willingness to experiment.
I’m curious how much stuff you’ve already seen is showing up in your Enriched list. There’s supposed to be zero or very little though we’ve had some trouble making that be the case.
Also would be good to know if this is stuff you’ve read onsite (greyed out) vs real elsewhere.
Looking at right now, the multi-year posts are grey links, while the month-scale posts are black links (that I saw and made the deliberate decision not to read at the time).
Seems you’re unlucky getting the greyed-out ones. We put in effort to ensure most people don’t get content they’ve read, and have mostly succeeded:
(full read means you scrolled all the way to the comments)
That said, when I reran the numbers after a more recent algorithm change, we saw a much higher clickthrough-rate on clicked-but-not-scrolled-to-comments posts than any other (~10% vs ~4%), so I expect we’ll experiment with reintroducing some greyed-out ones for people.
Regrettably, it’s harder still to avoid recommending posts that you saw and intentionally didn’t click. As Robert said, I don’t think we’ll get rid of the ability to just use Latest.
For what it’s worth, we don’t have a ton of insight into the algorithms driving the recommendations, beyond knowing what they take as inputs, and the additional constraints/modifications we place on their outputs. (But based on observing the recommendations for a while, it doesn’t seem like “this post has active discussion on it” is much of a factor.)
Anyways, we’re happy to have people switch back to the Latest tab for whatever reason and don’t currently have any plans to get rid of it. (Phrased defensively because I am sometimes surprised by proposals from others on the team, but at any rate I would strongly oppose getting rid of it unless there was a similarly-legible replacement that served a similar purpose.)
I’m also an edge case, I think for newer users there’s probably a much higher chance they’re getting recommended stuff they haven’t seen, which seems probably good.
(I somehow managed to miss that you were getting recommended a bunch of stuff you’d already read, so it’s possible my response was a bit confusing. As Ruby says, we’re trying to get already-read content filtered out, though it’s not doing a perfect job, especially for long-term users who’ve read a decent chunk of the posts on the site.)
I have switched back to the Latest tab, since if I get shown old stuff I’ve already seen, I want it to be because people are talking about it in an interesting way, not just because people are clicking on it.
EDIT: But I appreciate the willingness to experiment.
I’m curious how much stuff you’ve already seen is showing up in your Enriched list. There’s supposed to be zero or very little though we’ve had some trouble making that be the case.
Also would be good to know if this is stuff you’ve read onsite (greyed out) vs real elsewhere.
Looking at right now, the multi-year posts are grey links, while the month-scale posts are black links (that I saw and made the deliberate decision not to read at the time).
Cheers!
Seems you’re unlucky getting the greyed-out ones. We put in effort to ensure most people don’t get content they’ve read, and have mostly succeeded:
(full read means you scrolled all the way to the comments)
That said, when I reran the numbers after a more recent algorithm change, we saw a much higher clickthrough-rate on clicked-but-not-scrolled-to-comments posts than any other (~10% vs ~4%), so I expect we’ll experiment with reintroducing some greyed-out ones for people.
Regrettably, it’s harder still to avoid recommending posts that you saw and intentionally didn’t click. As Robert said, I don’t think we’ll get rid of the ability to just use Latest.
I would love to have a checkbox or something next to each post to indicate “I saw this and I don’t want to click on it”
Yeah, I think we should do something like this. Maybe the box is “don’t show me posts like this”
Although it would also be nice to distinguish that from “I read this post already somewhere else”
For what it’s worth, we don’t have a ton of insight into the algorithms driving the recommendations, beyond knowing what they take as inputs, and the additional constraints/modifications we place on their outputs. (But based on observing the recommendations for a while, it doesn’t seem like “this post has active discussion on it” is much of a factor.)
Anyways, we’re happy to have people switch back to the Latest tab for whatever reason and don’t currently have any plans to get rid of it. (Phrased defensively because I am sometimes surprised by proposals from others on the team, but at any rate I would strongly oppose getting rid of it unless there was a similarly-legible replacement that served a similar purpose.)
Appreciate the feedback re: desiderata!
I’m also an edge case, I think for newer users there’s probably a much higher chance they’re getting recommended stuff they haven’t seen, which seems probably good.
(I somehow managed to miss that you were getting recommended a bunch of stuff you’d already read, so it’s possible my response was a bit confusing. As Ruby says, we’re trying to get already-read content filtered out, though it’s not doing a perfect job, especially for long-term users who’ve read a decent chunk of the posts on the site.)