Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed
&gt; Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user….They limit what a user sees…never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better<p>I don’t know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv news app. That’s what I’ve done - written an algo that decides what news gets shown, in what order =&gt; implicitly means a whole bunch of newsclips never get shown…or they are at the end of the queue and 90% of the viewers would never get to them.<p>Why does one do this ? Because screen real estate is finite. You turn on your tv, you have a finite rectangular canvas - I can show maybe 5 squares on that rectangle without scrolling. Each square has a newsclip with text &amp; picture. Who gets to decide which 5 clips to show ? Well, my algo does. How else would you do it ? There are literally 100s of 1000s of newsclips per day! Can’t show every single one of them - nobody has the time, nobody would watch, most of it is not going to be relevant to the vast majority of the audience. So 10000 newsclips get filtered down to 5 clips that get shown on the screen. You scroll. 5 more. Scroll again. 5 more. So on…you cap at 50 clips…nobody scrolls that much anyways.<p>That’s why you have an algorithmic feed - because there is too much content, but your brain real estate is finite. Your screen real estate is finite. The amount of time you have to watch news is finite. Your interest in news is finite. All of this has been measured, analyzed, sliced &amp; diced. Your time is finite. But content is infinite. There is just too much news. Take finance news - 100s of companies reporting earnings every given day, associated commentary around buying&#x2F;selling that stock, how the company is doing…1000s of newsclips! Take political news - so much footage, all the way from local municipal town hall meetings to presidential press conferences. Take entertainment news…man, there is so much music&#x2F;movie&#x2F;art&#x2F;talent related content. Can’t show everything. Hence algorithmic feed.<p>Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.