It's the 21st century, people. I should be able to pause my music. The computer that makes musical recommendations to me should be able to distinguish between artists with the same name. In spite of those shortcomings
last.fm is the best way to listen to new music I like after
Delecious Agony, which isn't any more high-tech than your typical bunch of people with an awesome hobby.
The social web needs to die. I don't want or need ways to track what my friends are interested in. People have been friends for centuries before the internet and have developed all the infrastructure anyone will ever need for knowing what one another likes. I want a computer to anonymously find people whose interests align with my own and show me other things they've liked. Also, find articles that were liked by several anonymous people who also liked another common article with me. I want to see content I didn't know I wanted to see--and I don't care who else likes it, but confidence intervals on how likely I am to enjoy it would be appreciated.
Google turns the entire internet into an eigenvalue problem and solves it. It can't be that hard to implement a decent recommendation engine.
Digg had one that was exactly on the right track, but for some reason decided to kick it and replace it with a glorified RSS reader. Ever since I've been using
reddit, which despite spending about two hours a day browsing I still hate.
The karma economy sucks. It doesn't encourage people to post good articles. It encourages people to post the same article over and over again with different titles in different sub-reddits. And then in comment threads, people respond to the comments already on top instead of starting a new thread even if their comment is completely irrelevant so that people will see it and vote it up. I really want to know who wrote their sorting algorithm. The order of links on the "hot" page changes so fast that the "next" and "previous" buttons may as well say "shuffle".
So here's my not-so-humble list of things reddit needs to do to not suck:
- One submission per link. Same URL already submitted to any sub-reddit? Sorry, can't post it!
- No one abides by the "no editorializing" rule and it's entirely unenforced, so: may only use the title of the actual article to which you are linking.
- Fix the "hot" page so that pages don't surge back up to the top when someone replies to a comment someone left there a week ago long after the thread has become stale.
- Recommendation engine. I understand this is being worked on. It cannot come soon enough.