To people who believe this kind of project is "paternalistic" or that filtering out noise is somehow weak or irresponsible, I disagree.<p>Time is finite. It is impossible to consume all of the information that is published in the world. It's not just a little impossible: the fraction of information that an individual can consume is very near zero. Most people who have worked in an academic or scientific field know that it is impossible to consume even a fraction of the domain-specific publications in their field, much less "all the news that's fit to print."<p>It makes sense, therefore, to have a strategy for selecting a subset of information that one trusts as "worth considering," which might include a spam filter (just as email has, for good reason).<p>I personally very seldom read news articles shared online, because my experience has been that they are consistently of very low quality. Speaking for myself, I get big world event news from the Economist, which has earned some trust, and the rare nytimes/wsj article that is about something it can't possibly fuck up (anything outside the borders of the United States is generally beyond NYT/WSJ).<p>Would I be wrong for filtering all of the shared news articles from my feed? The only reason I keep them there is that I skim Facebook to get a feel for what people are thinking about and feeling on a given day (to stay slightly "in touch" with people, even if I think they wallow in a world of self-serving garbage information and would be better served by finding something more interesting to occupy their minds).<p>A better criticism of this kind of filtering might that it is intrinsically arrogant, but I don't think it is any more paternalistic or irresponsible than a spam filter for email.