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by madaxe_again
911 days ago
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Correct conclusion IMO. Many years ago I ran a social network with a focus on art and media, and we had a “show me another” button which picked a random submission to display. People complained that it wasn’t random. Incessantly. So I changed it, to instead maintain a list of previously viewed items for each user, and to exclude them from the results. And that was that. People almost immediately noticed that it had been “fixed”. There’s mathematically perfect, and then there’s user expectations - and ne’er the twain shall meet. |
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For something like XKCD this is a very good idea. It mitigates two possible perception problems amongst users:
1. Regular long-term readers who see true random as less so because it seems to show them things they already remember more than novel examples.
2. People who are regular and been around a while, but not for the half the length of the site's long history, because again they'll see less of what they've already seen than they would with true random.
The issue for a site like XKCD is the fact that many won't want to be tracked so for them any such effort is wasted. You can store the data in localstorage (it is a feature that can live without needing to track the same user between different devices and UAs) to mitigate the concern, but that is usually blocked by blocking cookies due to it having similar potential for more nefarious activity tracking.
To be honest, I'd just not bother. People will still complain anyway!