Mert Emin Kalender

Necessity Of Excessive Content Filtering

25 November 2012

A few months ago I started to follow articles on computer science related issues closely. I first discovered Hacker News. After a while I find out a number of people who writes and shares interesting stuff about technology, academia and life hacks. However, I find myself suffocated in dozens of articles, news stories and tweets soon and I recognised the necessity of excessive filtering of the constant flow of content.

At first, I was amazed with the quantity of content I am exposed to. But this didn’t seem to be a problem, since I was really passionate about reading all of them. Rather than using twitter to read random thoughts of friends and celebrities, I began following some tech related accounts. Twice a day I went over recent tweets. If I didn’t have time to read the article, I added it to my reading list on instapaper. Whenever I got a chance, I opened my reading list and read them one by one. At the same time I continued to discover new people and followed them as well. Before long I realized my consuming rate is not fast enough compared to the incoming rate of articles. My reading list was becoming larger and larger. Suddenly my passion turned into anxiety.

While I was struggling with content flood, I found some other people grumbling like me. James Hague complains about burden of technology and programming content by referring to the problem as background noise in his article. He shares a no-longer-bother-with list of content and states the outcome of his filtering action:

Being much more selective has kept me excited and optimistic and aware of possibilities instead of living down below in a world of endless detail and indecision and craning my neck to see what’s going on above the surface.

Similarly Joshua Gross refers to this issue in The Future is not Real-Time by saying

Content should always feel like a gift, not a burden. To turn it into a gift, we need to start focusing on ways to control the flow. As a result, after realising the enormous flow of content I have been going through, I started to filter out irrelevant ones in terms of my interests. While I check out recent tweets, if title seems interesting, I click and read the linked article. Otherwise, I may still the click and skim through the article and read if it seems interesting. Here it is really hard to define interestingness.

Personally I think an article is interesting enough if I might gain at least some information or insight about anything relevant to my life and profession. Still this is difficult to decide beforehand, but it keeps me away reading long lasting discussions about companies/products/programming languages or articles about internal workings of a startup or some event/incident/news related to a particular geography etc.

In my experience, if you are crushed with a mass of content, what you need to do is

Finally, here a list of twitter accounts I follow: