
It used to be that people who receive news through the Internet are less likely to be manipulated by the public mind by the media. Many proudly stated - "I do not watch TV, but I read news on the Internet." And it sounded as if the person knows the truth, unlike those who receive news using a cathode ray tube and TV speaker. Maybe it was once true, and the information on the Internet was not censored and propagandized, which I personally do not believe. But today it is difficult to find a source of news information that would not try to “feed” to people the useless rating information noise.
I would like to discuss filtering information on the Internet. Voluntary. The post is extremely debatable, and those who are interested in this question are welcome under cat.
I cannot speak for all Internet users, but there are undoubtedly people who are strained by the inability to filter the information flow. More precisely, the information flow is filtered, but only in the head. Everyone is forced to pass through a huge amount of information. The matter is aggravated by the fact that news portals are trying in every possible way to attract users by forming headlines containing deception or cunning. Under the heading "The dollar and the euro have strengthened sharply against the backdrop of a catastrophic fall in oil prices," anything can be found, a penny increase and a fall by thousandths of a percent. Of course, for a dozen people playing big on a currency or commodity exchange, the strengthening is really sharp, and the fall is really catastrophic. For the main mass of people, such information does not matter, and the defiant wording of the headline was created solely for the news to be read by as many users as possible, despite its unimportance for the majority. This is just one example and one can argue with its relevance, but for me the main thing was to convey the essence.
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Corruption in Russia, the fall of the aircraft, elections in the United States, terrorism, the exchange of prisoners of war, Ukraine in the end. I asked myself, which of the above is really important to me? It turned out that nothing. I would gladly turn off this news by clicking on the button, but unfortunately I can not. I know about dozens of news resources. I use two. Unobtrusively, in the field of view get the news from a couple of resources. For example, at the time of 11:43 Moscow time, 06.06.2016, everyone thought that it was interesting to me to know that "Nadezhda Savchenko arrived in the Donbass". And I could not dodge this news, although I really wanted to. In such a situation, there is a bunch of swearing epithets in the head against journalists, developers and administrators of news portals, and, in a particular case, about Savchenko herself. The latter, of course, suffers only from the fact that it came under the hot hand and in its place could be Putin with Obama or ISIS (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation). I did not order this banquet, but why should I pay for it? I think enough lyrics, I turn on the techie below.
I have long been visited by the thought of coming up with a technology that would help solve the problem of filtering news information on the Internet. But just like that, it is quite difficult to come up with a simple and elegant technology. Perhaps this is because this problem is “sucked from the finger,” and maybe because this is another attempt to automate is not automated. One way or another, I personally find it possible to create such a service. Using it, you can define a filtering pattern, which you can later apply to any news feed.
You say that there are content filters and you will be right, but only in part. Content filters block sites entirely, and filtering must be transparent. Not just to block sites with the specified words, but to clean the page in a modern "soft" manner with CSS and JS.
I think this article is quite enough to start a stormy or not very discussion. Should a person be able to restrict the flow of incoming information or does the brain do this well? Respond to the survey and share your opinion about the possibility of the existence of such technology in the comments.