Filtering "hot" questions [duplicate]

Question

Is there a way to filter the "hot questions" displayed in the Stack Exchange menu?

I have a profile on Stack Overflow and that's pretty much it. Therefore the list as it is now is pretty useless because it just adds noise - I'm not coming to Stack Overflow to discuss terrorists and the like ;-)

Answer 1

There are two alternative solutions to this:

• positive filtering: only show hot questions / sites that I'm active on. Much less noise, but doesn't achieve goal Jeff mentions — exposing you to questions from whole SE.

• negative filtering: show everything, except the sites that I explicitly block. This will lead to some initial noise, but I will be able to adjust that. It's harder to implement, and bit harder to use. However, this will achieve goal of exposing you to questions from other SE sites, including new ones.

Answer 2

Considering just how many duplicates and alternate versions of this question there are, it's shocking just how pitifully inadequate the response from the developers has been.

I'm tempted to believe that it's yet another case of SEO overriding user experience, but crawlers wouldn't get filtered, so that can't be the issue either. Seriously, what gives?

Let me be clear, here: I like the hot questions feature. I see a lot of fun/interesting posts that I normally wouldn't be exposed to. I get to pick up random useful tidbits of information and conversation pieces that actually benefit me in my daily life.

But there's some sh** that I'm just not interested in, was never interested in, never will be interested, just not going to happen ever, frickin' leave me alone already damn it!

Are you hearing me, SE? You've accomplished your goal, you've exposed us to the questions. We have, in turn, in our infinite wisdom, decided that entire categories are not of interest to us. I don't read the sports section of the newspaper - not even the headlines - likewise, I don't want to see links to questions on Chinese languages or have to keep hearing about the ever-expanding downward spiral of popularity contests on the "programming puzzles" site.

Yes, I know what you're thinking. "If you don't like the feature, don't use it/don't look at it. You're still not listening. I like the feature. I want to use it. But you could be linking me to interesting questions that I want to read, and instead they're being drowned out in noise that I'm never, ever going to care about. This is anathema to your goal of spreading the love. Instead of occasionally reading sci-fi questions that I know deep down are time-wasters, or trying in vain to remember my 3rd-year university solid state physics material, I just give up and ignore the sidebar because just looking at actually annoys me. And I'm not alone in this, just look how many people hate the system:

• What is the Goal of "Hot Network Questions"?
• Hide Hot Questions?
• Don't let questions stick to the top of the hot questions list forever
• Weight Hot Network Questions sidebar by viewer
• In “network hot” questions formula, discard answers when voting evidence indicates that these are not good data points
• Reorder questions picked for hot list based on adjusted hotness score (discard some answers by voting evidence)
• Prevent specific sites from being overrepresented in the hot questions list
• Make hot questions with multiple answers age away faster on smaller / subjective-ish sites
• Better criteria for the hot questions list
• Normalize the rankings for the "hot questions" list
• Hide questions I downvoted from my Hot Questions view
• Remove/downweight closed questions in "hot" question sort
• Unreadable LaTeX in hot questions
• https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/104923/141911
• Can you filter out certain SE sites from the hot questions list?
• Blocking certain stack exchange sites
• https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/104808/141911
• Can we customize or filter hot questions and site list in the StackExchange menu?

Geeze Louise, this goes way beyond "who moved my cheese" - people from all different backgrounds are screaming for some control over this feature.

I'm inclined to agree that whitelisting actually isn't the appropriate response here. Yes, really. This isn't a security or spam filtering system, and Jeff is/was right about one thing, its entire purpose is to bring people outside their narrowly-chosen fields of interest. That's a good thing, especially when it comes to new sites popping up - we want to give them a chance. However, we really should not rule out blacklisting here; I'm just never going to read a question on Islam or Biblical Hermeneutics. Seriously - not ever. For me, personally, those links are just taking up space that could be used to draw my attention to more interesting, more personalized content.

As both a user and a very experienced web developer who has spent a lot of time working with SEO, marketing and ecomm folks, I honestly cannot fathom why this isn't a priority. This is basically equivalent to having untargeted rather than targeted ads. We figured out more than 10 years ago that targeted ads got more than twice the click-through rate, and the statistic gets confirmed again and again. It's not just what the users want - there's real money in this equation.

Or, even better, instead of a blacklist, throw some of those fancy ComScore analytics at the problem to figure out which links people actually click on and how long they stay, and then apply some predictive personalization, which can actually give you 3-4x as many click-throughs.

Sigh. Anyway, time for something constructive from me. There was a user script posted in a duplicate question, but it was buggy and the UI has now changed (it's in the right sidebar instead of the "multicollider"). So, here's a newer user script, with bugs fixed and working on the right sidebar:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Filter Hot SE questions
// @namespace      http://stackoverflow.com/users/390278
// @include        http://stackoverflow.com/*
// @include        http://*.stackoverflow.com/*
// @include        http://superuser.com/*
// @include        http://*.superuser.com/*
// @include        http://serverfault.com/*
// @include        http://*.serverfault.com/*
// @include        http://stackapps.com/*
// @include        http://*.stackapps.com/*
// @include        http://askubuntu.com/*
// @include        http://*.askubuntu.com/*
// @include        http://*.stackexchange.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    function embedScript(id, main, globalFunctions) {
        var scriptElement = document.createElement("script");
        scriptElement.type = "text/javascript";
        scriptElement.id = id;
        var name, content = "";
        if (globalFunctions) {
            for (name in globalFunctions) {
                if (globalFunctions.hasOwnProperty(name)) {
                    content = content + name + "=(" + globalFunctions[name].toString() + "());\n";
                }
            }
        }
        content = content + "(" + main.toString() + "());";
        scriptElement.textContent = content;
        document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(scriptElement);
        return scriptElement;
    }

    embedScript("filter-hot-se-questions", function () {
        var enableLogging = false;

        var blacklist = [
            "codegolf.stackexchange.com",
            "chinese.stackexchange.com"
        ];
        var whitelist = [
            "stackoverflow.com",
        ];

        $(function() {
            var retryCount = 0;
            const retryMax = 3;

            function tryFilter() {
                var $query = $("#hot-network-questions li").filter(function () {
                    var $link = $(this).find("a");
                    var site = $link.attr("href").match(/:\/\/(?:www\.)?(.[^\/:]+)/)[1];
                    if (!site) {
                        return false;
                    }
                    var isBlacklisted = $.inArray(site, blacklist) >= 0;
                    var isWhitelisted = $.inArray(site, whitelist) >= 0;
                    var isBlocked = isBlacklisted && !isWhitelisted;
                    if (enableLogging) {
                        var msgData = { 
                            site: site,
                            isBlackListed: isBlacklisted,
                            isWhitelisted: isWhitelisted,
                            isBlocked: isBlocked
                        };
                        console.log(msgData);
                    }
                    return isBlocked;
                });

                if ($query.length > 0) {
                    $query.hide();
                    return;
                }

                if (retryCount++ < retryMax) {
                    window.setTimeout(tryFilter, 250);
                }
            }

            window.setTimeout(tryFilter, 250);
        });
    });
}());

It's a crappy solution, but it's better than nothing. Of course, I personally use a much longer blacklist, but that's for individuals to decide. I'm not sure why the original had a whitelist and a blacklist, since whitelisting is already the default, but whatever, I've left it in just in case somebody wants it.

Answer 3

I've written a Chrome extension to hide/filter the Hot Network Questions list. It hides all questions by default, or you can specify a whitelist or blacklist of sites and keywords you'd like to see.

You can install it from the Chrome Web Store or check out the code on GitHub.

Answer 4

I agree with Jeff. As I said before, I feel the StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™ is one of the features that best help beta sites grow. It has done wonders for us at Skeptics, and I would be surprised to hear we are alone. As such, I am against the concept of filters.

With that said, I think that, eventually, filtering by language will become a necessity. Right now, there's only one site that is not in English - German - and it even allows questions written in English (really?). However, as the Stack Exchange Network expends into more and more language, the importance of this feature will increase. Discovering a new interesting or reading something thanks to the hot question is cool, but content in languages I do not speak are of no interest to me - or anyone, really.

It's not a priority right now, but it will be - eventually.

Answer 5

For FireFox, there is the UnHot addon which should do just that.

Just install it to hide them.

_{I programmed it, see also https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/293137/289870}

Answer 6

Another option would be a 4th tab ("My Hot"), which uses either the positive or negative approaches suggested by vartec. Or you could beta-test both ideas with selected group, and see what the effects are on users.

My preferred method would be to "amazon" the data so that if you're signed up to say, "stackoverflow", "superuser" and "itsecurity", it works out that most people signed up to that are also signed up to "gaming" (even though you're not), and suggests questions based on that. (e.g. your stuff gets a boost to rank, stuff you "might" be interested in gets a minor boost, and stuff that's unlikely gets no boost)

I get the original idea, and as one of the primary contributors to parenting, I'm aware of the need to get the smaller sites more interest, but again, as one of the primary contributors to parenting, I'm aware that just because a question is popular with a large group of people doesn't mean it's not totally irrelevant to an even larger group. As stackexchange grows, not tailoring it is going to have a "wasting my time" effect.

If we're looking to avoid spurious and memeish Q&A's, better that we don't advertise "tex", "mathematica" and "cstheory" to people whose primary interests are "gaming", "parenting" and "judaism"

Answer 7

Please note that the intent here is to explicitly expose you to the most interesting questions from across the network, whether you have accounts on those sites or not.

edit: at the time I wrote the above, we did not have German, Japanese, or Judaism -- I am more sympathetic to the "this isn't even in a language I can read!" argument.