[sbuttgereit]

OK... opinion post here... hell with that... rant here.

I have to say the whole notion of "trending" I find ridiculous, and even a bit offensive. That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting, that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such. Even with the targeted suggestions they do when they look at my viewing history (and other history I'm sure), it's so incredibly ham-fisted I just want to shout, "hey maybe you should spend less time getting your AI to beat Go champions and more time getting it actually make useful and relevant recommendations that just maybe you can dispose of that 'trending' shit you're always foisting on everyone." (Of course, if Google actually got newer versions of the Youtube app to just work correctly with their Chromecast, I'd take that as progress).

Yeah, yeah, I know that they aren't trying to get the best matched content to me in the first place... just that which I might swallow and they can get the biggest bang for their investment... but the value proposition gets too diminished and I'm gone.... emphasis on stupidity such as "trending" pushes me to look at alternatives with some frequency. I've already left Twitter and Facebook due to this pushing trends stuff, Google is on the edge.

Of course, maybe I'm the outlier and I should just invest in Google, Twitter, Facebook, oh yeah and their traditional equivalents of "Us", "People", and the "National Enquirer" since that's where the masses apparently are.

The only trending I'd be interested in at all would be "trending" amongst a group of people whom I could actively curate in a list based on my tastes and interests and... importantly... theirs. It's clear to me that I can't outsource that curation just yet.

Finally... the front page of Hacker News is obviously just a big "trending" list. I have a higher affinity with the audience here, but still find about 60% - 70% of the front page content to be of zero interest and the comments hit much less; The 30% - 40% I come back for clearly has a high value to me, nonetheless. Between a tagging filter and having the ability to select a list of certain HN users to allow undue influence the results that I see when I come to the site would make it much, much better experience. (And I probably wouldn't be baited to post crap like this). In truth, I don't actually use the Hacker News homepage directly and instead start my journey at http://hn.elijames.org/

[ramblerouser]

I totally agree that popular stuff is beneath us techno wizards, but thats not the point of fairtrending.

The magic of social media is that corperate executives and media conglomerates don't get to pick what goes to the top. The users do. That's why Facebook 'curating' the trending news feed was so messed up. The whole point of trending is to see what actual real people are interested in, not just what a dozen editors in a backroom want you to see.

[sbuttgereit]

Sure, that's the idea, but it has no more chance of success than does Facebook purposefully curating to the masses... indeed: no curation suffers the same problem that someone's assumption about what I should be interested in, without first understanding me does: my wants, dreams, desires, fears, interests, curiosity, etc. are all out of the picture: be it the corporate curator or the unthinking algorithm, they all look the same. So, in the end "Fair Trending" is utterly useless to me; in fact, the posted site looks worse than Facebook curating the trending news... Facebook at least looked intelligently tone-deaf. The linked site... just looks mindless.

At the end of the day nobody should second hand their interests and be so passive as to care at all what "trends". In fact, a pure random pick out of all the possible options would likely be more interesting and engaging than this "Fair Trending" can do or corporate engagement efforts... while a random pick certainly wouldn't be perfect, it at least it surface interesting and original ideas/content that don't necessarily click the "group-think" and "lowest-common-denominator" boxes.

[golergka]

> That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting, that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such.

No, it's just basic human pshychology. People imitate other people. People like what other people like. This is wired into us on a very basic level.

Yes, these basic patterns are often stupid, from a purely rational persperctive. And yes, those of us who are trying to act more rationally (the HN, LessWrong crowd and others) see this behaviour as stupid. But it's irrational and naive to assume that it's easy or even possible to completely get rid of this basic behavioural patterns: they're wired in your brain on a very basic level, and you can only steer them and restrict them, but not remove it completely.

And one more thing: these patterns are quite often good rough heuristics to solve a lot of problems that we don't want to waste a lot of resources on. For example, if you don't want to be a fashion icon (reasonable assumption for most audience on this site), you can always just buy clothes from the most popular brand out there, and with very high probability, you'll get clothes that fit, are of reasonable quality and have neutral social signalling. Of course, if you invested a lot of time into your own research on the matter, you'd be able to find clothes that perfectly reflect your personality, more thoughtfully use cultural context, are of superior quality and may cost even less - but would you bother? Most of HN readers usually answer "no" to that, because they have other priorities in life.

Well, a lot of people just decide that their information diet on YouTube doesn't deserve such attention, and they're ready to watch whatever funny videos are just popular to fill their lunchbreak.