Give users the option to co-curate or customize their news feed
Hello.
Recently my news feed on the Yahoo homepage has been populating a lot of stories about gruesome familicide stories. I know some people find "grandmother dismembers grandchildren" type stories entertaining but I find them disgusting and disturbing.I never click on this type of content and so I'm completely flummoxed and baffled as to why one in every five stories in my feed seems to be one of these horrendous stories recently.
Doubtless there are users out there who are as sick of seeing stories about the Kardashians as I am about seeing murder stories. So here's my point:
We should have the means to easily let you know that Yahoo is making they quality of our user's experience take a nose dive with unwanted content in our news feed.
At the risk of generating even deeper media silos than is already generated by curated content a la algorithms, I think users would universally love the option to click on a button that indicates that Yahoo should restrict similar content from their feed in the future. It could be saved preference type of thing that could be changed/removed in the future.
The technology exists to do this---why not better serve your users this way?