I'm trying to build something which tackles this problem. The idea would be delegating the decision of what you consume to an algorithm (that you can control), and you'll be delivered a subset of news/content daily.
Basically a giant filter through which you consume the firehouse of FB/reddit.
Although it works for me, I've no idea how practical this is on a wider scale. Would you use something like that?
Isn't that pretty much what all platforms these platforms do these days, with algorithmic feeds? What level of control do you plan to add on top of it? And more importantly - how do you plan to monetize a model that's pretty much dependent on dopamine hits, without making it _more_ addictive/a time-waste?
Well, I've been building algorithms which explain _why_ something was surfaced, not just being a black box. Everything is controllable from data sources, ranking/filtering weights and a feedback mechanism to tweak this.
As for monetisation, I've thought about this a lot - and I don't think the time wasting is needed to create a good product. Google Search certainly isn't fueled by dopamine hits, and from an ads standpoint, our users are saying exactly what they want to see every morning.
Some platforms like Facebook and Twitter do, but HN and Reddit are (outwardly) based on votes, so you're seeing what the community thinks is important, not what you yourself do.
Mind you, there's a lot of people (myself included) who want to keep up to date on what others find interesting at the moment.
Reddit is arguably the original “algorithmic feed” - votes + the decaying algorithm make it way more “addictive” than if it was just a chronological series of posts, ordered by number of votes.
The popular/news sections of Reddit are also more heavily based on non-vote signals, like FB.
I also think that allowing the user to track the changes made to this algorithm along with some metrics ( like how much time user spent on topics, time wasted etc) would provide a helpful feedback loop.
Basically a giant filter through which you consume the firehouse of FB/reddit.
Although it works for me, I've no idea how practical this is on a wider scale. Would you use something like that?