I spend an awful lot of time on Reddit and HN. That said, it is clear that these platforms are not perfect, in fact they are pretty far from perfect. Reddit is super clunky, and can be a pain to navigate. HN is just the opposite, almost too lite. Further, it seems that the content on HN is usually much better, but I find myself almost avoiding it sometimes, strictly based on the platform. Also, when I am on Reddit for a while, I always end up looking at odd things.¹ This is about to change. I just came across a new web platform, on Reddit coincidentally, that aggregates all of the aggregators into a simple, easy to follow stream.

This is sageBump. Beyond simple aggregation, sageBump merges the rankings from all the various feeds – Reddit, StackOverflow, Slashdot, HN, and BitcoinTalk:

You spend your day flipping through different Social News Aggregator Sites and their linked content. Desperately trying to find something interesting amongst their many jaded and heavy handed ranking algorithms. Articles are brought in, and each site has their collective weighted, to allow a good mix on the front page. Have it all in the same place, sorted and cross-site-ranked against each other.²

Further, sageBump does a good job explaining the ranking. When you hover over the icon of the source, HN in the image above, it breaks down the ranking and score. According to the explainer, “Each Aggregator site has an opaque rule system which affects the links you see. SageBump offers universal icons to help you understand the quality of a post, by giving you the reason for its rank.”³ Displaying the rankings, however, is not enough. sageBump runs all posts through their own algorithms to create a standard ranking:

The usual parsing feeds, throwing them together, then *lightly* applying to each sourced group of articles their corresponding customised sageBump algorithm. The details of how to implement a fair sorting algorithm to adjust for HN article flags can be found in the link below. For Reddit I use a slightly modified version. Once the received article are applied their corresponding algorithm, they are merged together. Each group is applied a further weighting, simply to get a nice mix on the sageBump page.⁴

sageBump has all the usual personalisation bells and whistles. You can add custom feeds and filter out articles by words:

Overall, I am thoroughly impressed. I plan to use sageBump from here on out. The only downside, no more AdviceAnimal memes.