Refine interests setup and discovery#68

Provide some additional help with discovery for interests. Suggestions include providing all interests for all users in a list ranked by popularity and /or articles matched per day to allow discovery. Automatically suggest merging of interests when users have more than 20 or 50 interests and they have very similar interest items. Fuzzy matching when typing a interest manually to add to match any existing interests already defined on the site (still allow manual editing).

Great suggestion! I’ve been meaning to improve the onboarding flow with something like this for a while. I’ll give it some more thought.

I’m still working on the overhaul of the initial onboarding flow but two related features are:

• You can browse popular interests at https://scour.ing/browse/interests/popular
• The form to add interests on the Interests page now has autocomplete and will suggest topics based on other users’ interests

I forgot to update this ticket but the onboarding flow has been completely overhauled so that you now write free-form text that then gets translated into interests. The Browse Popular Interests page is also split into categories so it’s easier to navigate and look for other topics you might be interested in.

Regarding merging interests when users have many, the feed does balance between not only individual interests but also groups of related interests to show you diverse content, even if you have tons of (similar) interests.