This is a pretty disappointing response, especially given it seemed like such a future-near change 9 months ago (https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/…). Also, didn’t you just recompute unread counts for the 30-days-unread change? As we found out several months back, with proper notice, people are willing to undergo a day or two of slight madness in exchange for a massive improvement in app quality. I care much more about this feature on the web than I do on mobile since the majority of my use is on the Web and it is clearly the flagship Newsblur product. Without out this tweak, the intelligence filter is basically useless for me.
Here’s a metaphor: I love my friends, but I don’t love everything they talk about, nor should I. You’re saying that, because I love my friends, I *HAVE* to listen to them talk about babies (a thing I don’t care about) and also cocktails (a thing I do care about), even though I’ve made it clear that I don’t want to hear about babies. But because I love my friends, it is all or nothing.
Similarly, if I have given a particular author the thumbs-up, I must wade through their posts on topics I absolutely do not care about (because I’ve told NB so) to find the ones that I do care about.
straying a bit from this subtopic, one question about “training logic” that I don’t understand: does “red” and “greening” of tags in a feed only effect how that feed is displayed, or is it a global function across all feeds one’s subscribed to? If I don’t care for blog x’s “cats” posts but know that if blog y posts about “cats” then it must be important, can I red blog x’s tag but green blog y? or is it all just one big “cats” tag?
They’re not talking about them in the same conversation (post), though. It’s cocktails THEN babies, not cocktails AND babies. The current intelligence trainer is effectively forcing me to stay in the room when they start to talk about babies, even though I’d rather go and get another drink.
In that case, you’d have a +1 and a -1, which you’d want to show up as neutral? I can understand a few -1’s and only a single +1, but even then I felt that the +1 was enough to highlight the story.
Yes, I would want it neutral in that instance. But I *definitely* wouldn’t want it green because I specifically said I don’t want to hear about babies! Even if it’s my friends who I love that are talking, I still don’t want to listen to topics that I have specifically said I don’t want to hear about.
For a real blog example, I read Jezebel and generally like Lindy West’s writing, so I have given her the +. However, she tends to also post their daily celebrity gossip roudup feature which I do not care to see. I have the gossip tag as a -, as well as “celebrity”, “kim kardashian”, “taylor swift”, “us weekly”, etc. The problem is that I can have a post with so many red tags that I am *clearly* not interested in the topics contained therein, despite it being posted by a writer I like, and it still shows up in the green. So I still have to filter it with my own brain, instead of using Newsblur’s magic extra brain (which is the main reason I stuck with NB in the first place!).
Just to present the other side of this, I like the way the training works now. A few of my feeds do ‘roundup’ posts, and if one of those posts touches on a topic I flagged as a +1 as well as a few topics I flagged as -1s, I would still want to read that post. Or, part of the post. So what karen describes wouldn’t work for me at all.
The real question is about how many users are really annoyed vs how many don’t realize or simply don’t care about the uselessness (sorry for being blunt) of the trainer. The assumption you so often made here on the forum about a user “implicitly saying he/she wants to read a feed once subscribed” simply disqualifies the value-add the training is supposed to bring. What’s the point of the trainer if I want to read everything from a feed?
The “FAQ” definition (https://newsblur.com/faq) is also somewhat misleading and should then be changed from
“Stories marked with red as hidden and are only shown when you hit the “Show Hidden Stories” button.”
to
“Stories marked with red are hidden, unless they have been marked as green, and are only shown when you hit the “Show Hidden Stories” button” or have marked them green."
