Most Readers Don't Like Customized News

An anonymous reader writes "Despite the push by organizations such as Google and Yahoo!, a recent study found not everyone is a fan of web-based customization for news. The researchers defined customization as when the user gets to choose specific topics to read on a daily basis. Instead, some prefer personalization. This is when the system chooses content based on a reader's past choices. 'The obvious assumption is people would like more control over what they read,' Sundar said. 'We found when it came to evaluating new stories and quality of content, customization was the preferred method for power users. If you were not a power user, you wanted the system to tailor the news for you.'"

I don't want any customization

[timeOday]

It's selection bias. I intentionally visit salon.com and foxnews.com back-to-back to make sure I've covered both extremes.

Personalisation

[Sonny Yatsen]

I have no problems with personalisation, which I take (based on the article's pretty unclear description) is where the system tries to predict news stories based on what you read in the past. However, I do have problems with the personalisation algorithms used. I get useless news articles that I would never have actually read, while the system hides stories I might actually be interested in.

Until the personalisation algorithms used by news sites surpass my ability to filter news that I read, I'll probably not use any sort of personalised news site.

Power user?

[rs1n]

WTF is a "power user"? Is someone selling illicit forms of "power" and I'm just not aware of it? Is this just someone who actually does more than click on the website to read their content? What sets a power user (as far as news-reading is concerned) from your "typical" user? Sounds to me like a lot of bullsh*t buzzwords to merely say that most people will choose to read whatever they want to read -- like a real newspaper. I don't read every little article written -- just whatever catches my fancy.

Re:Professors of communications...

[Peeteriz]

Read TFA or even the summary - while people love personalized news, according to TFA most don't like or want to do the customization themselves - so system where you can customize/select/configure news types as you describe is inconvenient, but only a system that guesses your preferences automagically based on your clicks, behavior, whatever is seen as desirable.

And I entirely agree with the professor. I have strong preferences for various news types, but I can't be bothered to manually customize even the slashdot article categories.

Re:I don't want any customization

[cappp]

I come to Slashdot for the comments. The story-summaries are usually questionable but the articles themselves tend to be rather interesting (and Idle is awesome for my despair-about-humanity-emo-rants) however the real treasure tends to lie down below when everyone piles on. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of pure rubbish festering around the place, but I usually leave a comments threat benefitting from a well argued perspective or a link to some resource I didn't know existed. I've used Slashdot as a research tool many-a-time, mining the comments for data or at least the beginning of a search for data, hasn't let me down yet.

And all the goatse links a man could ever want.

Or maybe a time-of-importance ranking

[presidenteloco]

First, give me stuff that will affect all of humanity for a time period of 50 years or more,

then, stuff that affects everyone everywhere for about 5 to 10 years

1-2 years

then getting more local (my nation or region, my city or local region)

I should be able to flip which is more important, the effect-time or the geographic scale,
and be able to flip the order I care more about in terms of local, state, national, regional, global

Polarization

[theshowmecanuck]

I think having the system automatically personalize your news based on prior viewing history is bad for society. Right now in both Canada and the U.S.A. there is increasingly extreme polarization between conservatives and liberal (R versus D in the 'States). Granted people view what is of interest to them but when they are served ONLY news pages based on the articles they normally view, they never get the chance to see a different view point. Sure they can search for it if they want, but out of sight generally means out of mind. This can only lead to increasing polarization.

I believe one of the insidious dangers of the web is that it allows people to not only associate with those of like ideas, but to focus those ideas/ideals. science fiction author Gordon R. Dickson explored this idea in his Dorsai books. His idea was that if man were to be able to migrate to different star systems, those with like minds would choose to locate together. In his books, there ended up being planets of mostly agnostic scientists, mostly philosophers, religious fanatics, etc. And all with strong feelings towards their own doctrines. As they isolate themselves, the stronger their ideologies become. I see the internet facilitating this on our one and only planet and within countries, and often pan-nationally. People with like interests form groups on the internet, associate with proportionally more people in those groups on the internet, and become very entrenched in those ideas (i.e. closely interact proportionally more with internet friends than than they would with real people they meet in the 'real world') . Before the internet we had no choice but to interact only with real people who generally had a wider range of ideas and ideals.

While the internet is generally a good thing, I think the biggest danger of it is the polarization of society. Helping people to only see one view point is only contributing to this negative aspect. I wonder if it would help to instead of only choosing similar news viewpoints to what people normally look at, to make sure the system automatically presents at least a few news stories reflecting something different. i.e. Provide choices of what people generally view, but always show a few alternatives so that perhaps they might choose them occasionally and the system doesn't spiral the viewer into say radical right or radical left wing only ideologies in the news that is presented to them.

they're just doing it wrong

[PJ6]

Why make people chose what they want when it would work better the other way round? Just give us a block feature that works like Facebook - mouse over an article and an X appears over a corner, and when you click on it you'd get options like 'Hide this article', 'Hide this author', 'Hide stories about football', 'Hide stories about sports'. No longer seeing crap I will never be interested in, yet not narrowing content to just what I pick, that would make me a pretty happy reader.