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Digest top section
I know I've beaten this drum before, but it's a significant issue for me. I love the layout of the digest page. I like it better than the cover page. However the cover page remains my starting page. This is because I hate (I thought about using all caps there, but resisted) the selection of content in the top digest section. It's always from a few high volume non-favorite feeds. There is a related issue with the top articles on category pages.
I realize it probably works for a lot of people who want to see the most recommended articles out of all their feeds. But for people like me, whose most interesting feeds and articles are not from the top feeds, this section is polluted by articles from the top feeds. The only way I could stand to use the digest page is to unsubscribe from those feeds. I think that a great strength of the modern approach to news reading is the ability to follow closest what is most interesting to the reader, rather than the preferred content of someone else, whether it is a newspaper editor or the masses of tech blog readers and recommenders.
I suggest that there be either different default behavior or a knob that controls how the articles on top of the digest are selected. For the latter, the user could choose whether the articles come from 1) all feeds or 2) favorite feeds only. Another option, 3) would be to take articles from favorite feeds in the rightmost (first) category only. I think that (1) is the current behavior, (2) would be a big improvement for me, and (3) would allow me to strictly control what feeds go into the section, but it might be overkill. While option (3) isn't relevant in the context of category pages' top sections, I would like to be able to give favorite feeds preference for the top articles section on category pages.
If you don't want to add another option, perhaps option (2) could become the default behavior.
I realize it probably works for a lot of people who want to see the most recommended articles out of all their feeds. But for people like me, whose most interesting feeds and articles are not from the top feeds, this section is polluted by articles from the top feeds. The only way I could stand to use the digest page is to unsubscribe from those feeds. I think that a great strength of the modern approach to news reading is the ability to follow closest what is most interesting to the reader, rather than the preferred content of someone else, whether it is a newspaper editor or the masses of tech blog readers and recommenders.
I suggest that there be either different default behavior or a knob that controls how the articles on top of the digest are selected. For the latter, the user could choose whether the articles come from 1) all feeds or 2) favorite feeds only. Another option, 3) would be to take articles from favorite feeds in the rightmost (first) category only. I think that (1) is the current behavior, (2) would be a big improvement for me, and (3) would allow me to strictly control what feeds go into the section, but it might be overkill. While option (3) isn't relevant in the context of category pages' top sections, I would like to be able to give favorite feeds preference for the top articles section on category pages.
If you don't want to add another option, perhaps option (2) could become the default behavior.
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Inappropriate?Hi Phil,
I think I understand your concern. One question: have you tried making the feeds you really like your favorite and marking the feeds you do not care so much about but are highly recommended non favorites? Could you please try that for me please?
If that does not work, then we could add a knob to let the user choose if favorite is more important or most recommended is more important if two feeds do not have the same favorite state. What I mean is that there are 4 buckets:
Bucket #1: Favorite and recommended
Bucket #2: Favorite but not highly recommended
Bucket #3: Not Favorite but highly recommended
Bucket #4: Not Favorite and not highly recommended
The key question is:
#1 > #2 > #3 > #4
or
#1 > #3 > #2 > #4
What makes it a little more complicated in that there is a time factor and the time factor is slightly different for high volume feeds than it is for low volume feeds but let's address this issue first and we can look at time/freshness once this snake is dead.
Thanks.
Edwin -
Inappropriate?With respect to your question in paragraph 1, yes the feeds that are overwhelming my top section articles are non-favorites. I also note that this is an issue not only for digest, but also the category and cover pages' article selection.
Given that there is no fancy mechanism for reading my mind on the horizon, I prefer #1 > #2 > #3 > #4.
In principle, #1 > #3 > #2 > #4 sounds reasonable, but in practice doesn't work for me. The high volume, highly popular feeds seem to always have a wealth of recommended articles and my favorite feeds do not have many recommenders, so buckets #1 and #2 are usually close to empty and bucket #3 is always overflowing.
(Also, some feeds (e.g., ReadWriteWeb) consistently have articles with tons of recommendations, while another lower-volume feed that has a outstanding article might get one or two. If they are in the same bucket, I believe the current algorithm means you'll see only the highly recommended articles from ReadWriteWeb.) -
Inappropriate?I will take a look at the algorithm again later this afternoon and will keep you posted. What you are asking is very reasonable: we should not allow highly recommended articles from non-favorite feeds overwhelm the content of the digest. Note: the digest has already some logic to promote diversity both across categories and feeds (ie the score of the nth recommendation is divided) but this seems to not be enough and not work well when comparing entries which have recommendations and entries which do not have recommendations. I understand your requirement well so I will play with it and get back to you - when we get this fixed, it will automatically spread across all the pages. Thank you very much for the feedback!
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Inappropriate?Update: Phil, I played a little bit with the filtering logic used in the digest to try to promote more aggressively articles from the users favorite sources. Please not that this will be amplified if the favorite source has 25 or less unread articles.
Here is a daily build: If you have 5 minutes, could you please give it a spin and let me know if the changes are heading in the right direction:
http://update.feedly.com/daily/feedly...
DANGER: the daily build do not have patching or updating capabilities so it is highly recommended that after testing the daily build you re-install the latest release build from http://update.feedly.com/daily/feedly... (or you will be locked in the past :-) ) -
Inappropriate?Update: The feedback from a couple of other internal users was positive so we included in these changes in the 1.2.194 patch we just pushed out to address a layout issue if the google search overlay so no need to install the daily build. To see the changes, simple restart firefox or point your browser to http://update.feedly.com/release/feed...
Let us know what you think! -
Inappropriate?Better I think. Certainly is nice to see some variety in the top section. I'll stick with this version for a bit, see how the articles that are displayed update, and let you know of my impressions.
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Thanks. I am going to talk to the team about publishing the filtering logic on our blog to provide more transparency about how we do the filtering and let other people provide suggestions. -
Inappropriate?Was the filtering changed back? After a brief respite, I'm seeing a return the endless parade of recommended articles from non-favorite feeds in the top section. Perhaps it's just that yesterday I had cleared out all the most highly recommended articles before and now there is a fresh set of such articles. But it seems clear that the #1 > #2 > #3 > #4 logic above isn't operative. This is 1.2.1.2.196 (build 2419).2 Comments Add a comment
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We did not change anything. When you mouse over the title of the entries in the page: are the entries platinum, gold, silver or bronze? Can you take a sample of 10-20 articles on the page and let me know what the platinum, gold, silver, bronze distribution looks like? The change we made yesterday was to make it easier for fresh articles from your favorite sources with less then 25 unread counts to make it to the platinum status and harder for non-favorite high volume feeds to gain that status. We also changed the logic so that the latest 2 articles from your favorite sources get promoted to silver. We are happy to iterate on the change until it is right, just need to understand your environment a little better and where the problem is.
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one more question: do most of your favorite feeds have more or less than 25 unread articles?
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Inappropriate?Currently the top three articles on the digest page are all bronze and all from Engadget (3, 8, and 11 hours old with 3, 5, and 2 recommendations). The category sections of the page display many bronze article summaries, but also a number of platinum and silver article summaries. Many of these are from favorite feeds with fewer than 25 unread articles and no recommendations. E.g., some say "platinum: first recent from rare". A number of the bronze items are from a high-volume favorite feed that has 100 unread articles (even there I'm not sure that even the freshest article from a high-volume favorite feed should be deprecated).1 Comment Add a comment
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I see. What could be happening is that the Platinum and Silver might not include pictures in which case feedly is just going down the list until if find some articles which have pictures.
Let's break that problem in two:
1) what articles do you know exist in your feedly but are not included in the digest? (let's try to see if we can catch those gems).
2) Once all the good articles are in the digest list, how should we enhance the layout of the digest to better promote the good stuff even if they do not include visual.
Are we inline? -
Inappropriate?I think you nailed the problem. Most of my favorite feeds have very few pictures with their articles.
I don't see a significant problem with (1), except that unless I set the list length to L, the high-volume favorite feed that I'm behind in reading (>100 unread) displays no articles on the digest page. I think that limiting the number of articles displayed from the feed is helpful, but something should get through since it is a favorite.
With respect to (2), I'm not sure what the answer is for everybody, but if feedly has to skip over a bunch of silvers and platinums to find a bronze article with a picture, it should probably assume that, for this person at least, pictures aren't that important and take the top three anyway.1 Comment Add a comment
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OK. At least we know what the problem is. I think that you are right...Promoting bronze to the top of the page just because they have a picture is not really smart. Will have to look into this with a couple of there people in our team and see what we can do. Thank you very much for your feedback. Much appreciated!
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Inappropriate?Question: Would something like this be acceptable if the entry does not have a picture?
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Inappropriate?Too jarring. I'd suggest just an image placeholder like the cover and category pages use when there is no image.2 Comments Add a comment
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Would be better if the article title were the same size as the other two articles.
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Fair enough...let me see what I can do.
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Inappropriate?Update: Phil, we pushed out a new version of the filtering logic in the 1.2.197 patch we just pushed out. If you get a chance to try it, please let us know what you think. Thank you. -Edwin
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Inappropriate?Much better, the annoyance factor, at usually seeing the same type of uninteresting material, is gone.
One thing that seems improvablable is that it seems that a too heavy premium is placed on the recentness of an article. For example, I have a favorite feed with 2 recommendations on an article from 1 day ago. However, the article doesn't show on the digest page or the top section of the relevant category page. A different, unrecommended article (19 hours old) from the same feed does.
I'm not sure there isn't a good reason arguing the other direction, but I think that within a bucket a recommended article from a feed should generally be promoted over an unrecommended article.
It will be interesting to think about the problem more carefully once you make your algorithm public. I'll also keep watch on the question, though at least for now, the limitations aren't glaring. -
Inappropriate?Here we go Phil: http://blog.feedly.com/2009/03/06/ope...
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