Open Bug 1602697 Opened 5 years ago Updated 10 months ago

Allow instant (and lasting) dismissal of any item recommended by Pocket at about:newtab

Categories

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, enhancement, P3)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
New Tab Page
Version:
71 Branch
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

()

Status:
UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: grahamperrin, Unassigned)

References

(Depends on 1 open bug,
URL
)

Details

(Whiteboard: [hnt])

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0 Waterfox/56.3

Steps to reproduce:

  1. new tab
  2. point-and-click

Actual results:

  1. move the pointer
  2. dismiss
  3. repeat steps 2, 3 and 4 for each item to be dismissed
  4. browse
  5. quit
  6. start Firefox
  7. Pocket unintelligently re-presenting items in which I explicitly expressed zero interest
  8. point-and-click
  9. move the pointer
  10. dismiss
  11. repeat steps 10, 11 and 12 for each item to be dismissed

… and so on.

Expected results:

  1. instant dismissal (point-and-click) without requiring additional movement or a second click

– and not repeated ignorance of my disinterest (bug 1584510).

Background

See for example https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/dn7mrv/firefox_pocket_soon_or_what/faddo9y/:

… hundreds of articles I've read so they know what I like …

… It's equally, if not more, important for the software to learn what a person does not like. Near-instant dismissal is a quick way of conveying the opinion. Quick, but not quickest; not most effective.

The integration with Firefox allows dismissal, but it's not instant. It's necessary to point, click, move the pointer then again click – four steps.

Integration should be improved to allow instant dismissal:

  • point-and-click.

…

URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comm...
Component: Untriaged → Pocket
Depends on: 1584510

Scott - can you look into this and make a recommendation/ask the question of Product/UX?

Flags: needinfo?(sdowne)
Component: Pocket → New Tab Page
Flags: needinfo?(sdowne)

This makes me think of a "less of this"/"more of this" type of personalization. Which would be pretty interesting.

All of our stories would need some sort of interest based tagging exposed.

Without that, making dismissal top level (not in the context menu) has less impact, but would be a product question.

Flags: needinfo?(tkanhema)
Priority: -- → P3

Thanks folks.

If you can get the UX closer to this, it'll feel much less like non-customised repetitive advertising much more like an intelligent system.

It's great to have "Recommendations from Pocket". The parallel/flip-side is that Pocket should respond logically to feedback from the user (it may help to think of dismissals as "Recommendations to Pocket").

I mean, in reality, if a person actively tried to sell offer me the same magazine day after day after day, with the same front cover, after me (every day) looking the person in the eye and saying "No, thank you", I'd begin to wonder what was going through the person's mind :-)

I tired of the endless repetition.

For a technology that is (overall) promoted as intelligent, the intrusive lack of intelligence to this aspect of integration with Pocket pushed me over the edge a few months ago; I removed Pocket from my new tab page.

Clear a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user.

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Flags: needinfo?(digitalnewslab)
Severity: normal → S3
Whiteboard: [hnt]
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