This becomes suboptimal on a news site. I don't want to just see content that I know and is interesting to me, I want to read things I would have never have a chance of coming across otherwise. Of course, it is also impossible to read everything. This is why the voting system works so well. If many users find an article interesting, chances are that it will be interesting to everyone. This dynamic is increased substantially with a specific group like Hacker News. This is why I don't like personalised pages, they are only really feasible for things like google+ and certain types of searches.

For those downvoting: Please share your thoughts. If you disagree, I'd love to know why.

It's not you; it's that pg has said many times (and I agree) that fragmenting the front page is a bad idea. We must all see the same front page to judge the same quality.

Interesting. However, many people already filter the first page, let it be by points, or by the twitter accounts:

http://twitter.com/#!/newsyc20

http://twitter.com/#!/newsyc50

http://twitter.com/#!/newsyc100

http://twitter.com/#!/newsyc150

And from each filter, people auto-select things that interest them. Sometimes I only see a story when it is retweeted to me.

And this you can't prevent. It lies on the fact that different people have different definitions of what "quality" means.

Which is the core problem highlighted by linked blog post.

The front-page of HN is a filtered list in and of itself. And I for one actually like the result.

Some people would like to see a different filter and thus create one, because they can. That is indeed not something you can, or should want to, prevent.

But the fact that some people create their own filters is not a motivation to not tweak the HN front-page filter in such a way that the front-page matches the intended goal (pg's goal in this case, presumably adopted by the majority of HN readers, more-or-less codified in the guidelines) as closely as possible.

"The core problem ... lies on the fact that different people have different definitions of what "quality" means."

The user is not the problem. The user is the solution. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3170840

I agree with this. However I don't think that existing communities can easily adapt to this well. Instead I think it has to be something that is part of the initial design of the platform so that it's tightly integrated into the service. You could go further than Google and actually deeply integrate a social graph with feed weighting based on who you follow and what they vote on as well as your previous voting record and maybe some shortcut to topic, such as tags.