A Suggestion for Hacker News – Feed Filtering

9 points by SwimSwimHungry 4 years ago | 8 comments

I want to start off with saying I generally enjoy this site. It’s a great place to find links to news, blogs, and other interesting technology-centric websites.

To that end, and I believe there are quite a few that may agree with me, it would be nice to be able to hide or remove certain types of entries from the list, such as cough cryptocurrency, NFTs, any-fly-by-night project, what have you.

It would be cool if this site could offer a feature like Reddit where you can actively subscribe to the types of things that interest you, and ignore everything else.

If other folks want to discuss the topics, so be it. But let me opt out going forward, please. I used to really get involved in the discussions around cryptocurrency, but frankly it hasn’t been good for my sanity and I’d rather just go about my life not hearing about it anymore.

It’s exhausting to hear how someone thinks they are gonna make it, or how fiat is filthy and I’m an idiot for not just following the bandwagon. At this point, I have no more energy to expend on the topic and want to go back to a pre-2012 Internet, before the snake oil ruined everything.

daviddever23box 4 years ago |

I’d start by filtering all YouTube URLs: I’m a busy person (read as: short attention span) and don’t have time to spend waiting for relevant content, when I can find it in static form.

sdrinf 4 years ago |

Personally, I use and recommend https://github.com/ShamariFeaster/chrome-extension-hn-filter... which allows you to set keywords (and domains) to automatically hide on the main feed. Actually useful keywords vary over time, so this is something you have to curate manually, but saved me a lot of attention so far.

dcminter 4 years ago |

I'd be in favour. I'm somewhere in the middle on crypto, but the two sides just shouting at each other is really... boring! I'm also not a fan of anything health related where otherwise rational sane engineers suddenly become woo obsessed believers.

In the absence of such a filter, skimming the list and selecting hide on the obvious tarpits helps for me. Less temptation to click on them when not much else is new.

Festro 4 years ago |

Oh man this would be great. Perhaps even just a browser extension that you can add filter terms to.

-elon -crypto -nft -tesla

chmaynard 4 years ago |

I have made a number of feature requests and suggestions in the past. As far as I know, none of them have ever been implemented. I once offered to help them implement dark mode but apparently they don't take outside submissions.

dredmorbius 4 years ago |

Individual submissions may be hidden by tapping the "hide" link.

rogerian 4 years ago |

I'd like to be able to filter out any domains of my choosing for instance, sites that are generally behind paywalls

daviddever23box 4 years ago | |

+1. Paywalls are for dinosaurs.