I will never, ever be interested in "Humans of New York", but it is recommended every day. Please recommend another blog.

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The recommended site changes periodically. If you don’t like it, don’t add it. Use the arrows to browse past recommended sites, or just wait for the next one. :smiley:

Sorry, them’s the breaks until I build a targeted discovery platform for feeds and stories. Until then, they are hand-picked sites.

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I like these recommendations a lot. At least 75% of them found its way into my collection of sites.

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Where can the “recommended sites” be turned off?

It’s a very difficult topic. You have courage to even offer recommendations. No site will be sufficiently anodyne that your recommendation will not irritate someone. Phys.Org, for example, is on the wrong side of environmental issues. Humans of New York could be considered an oxymoron by some. You get my drift. It’s interesting in that it may reveal your personal choices and interest. I picked up Colossal, by the way … hippies design stuff. Very cool.

That said, there are some folks, and I might be one of those, who don’t want their tools recommending stuff. Such features have too many evil implications. Yes, I know you are not mining my saved stories and folder names to make me personal recommendations. Unlike with Amazon, Google, and Facebook, my data is not your product. (If I thought it was, I would so outa here.) Still, the whole notion of “recommended for you based on your browsing history” has poisoned that well, but good.

That may be a bit paranoid, but it is also one of the reasons I don’t use your training feature. It’s bad enough you know what I am reading, without knowing details of why I like or don’t like it. I think that supplying that information just leads you into temptation. In a few years we may find out Newsblur is a front for a giant data collection project. That would be sad. What may be sadder is that we have to consider such things entirely possible these days.

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If you don’t like it, don’t look at it?

I’m not sure why people are finding this so offensive, it’s not taking up valuable space or right in your face, and there’s no actual reason to ever even view the dashboard, so what’s the issue?

Nobody said it’s “offensive”.
I find however that there’s room for improvement in the current behaviour.

This is a proper place where to make requests for improvement.

My default view is -and is going to be- the dashboard so recommendations do take valuable space.

I like them a lot too, but this is clearly subjective.

I think the real issue is that once I have decided I’m not subscribing to it, there’s no point in me to see the same recommendation anymore.

As a paying user, I’d appreciate to be able to turn off all recommendations.

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Why not just add a skip/hide button?

As a workaround, I used AdBlock plus to hide the recommendation section altogether.

I don’t see what’s so hard about turning it off. It has no value currently. Even if you sometimes add recommended sites, the value is lost at that point.

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Even better, how about a “don’t recommend stuff” option? At least for those of us who have paid?

The recommendation thing is really just nuisance-ware clutter, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any actual recommendation system: just untargeted advertising (which we know is always a negative for user satisfaction on the web).

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Dismissable would be nice. Fine, recommend me something new every week. But once I’ve either subscribed to it, or decided I’m not going to, stop showing it.

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