Trace - F**k The Algorithm. Make Your Own
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Trace helps you keep up by pulling content from multiple sources — like YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, Medium, and X — into one place.
It learns from your work and feedback, remembers what matters, and surfaces signals from across the web without pulling you in.
Replies
Trace
@tarat Congrats on the launch Tarun. Is there a negative keyword rule or allowed/disallowed times? Like "Keep Justin Bieber away"/categories like politics, sport, trash (cat videos)? allowing for focus vs fun?
Trace
@zolani_matebese Thank you! 🙏
Yes — there is a way to do this already. In your profile → advanced settings, you can add negative keywords and adjust what categories you want to keep out of your feed (or keep very low-priority). It’s meant to give you guardrails for focus vs fun without turning into constant micromanagement.
Those settings act more like soft constraints than hard blocks, so the feed stays flexible but doesn’t drift into things you’ve explicitly said you don’t want.
If you try it out and it doesn’t behave the way you expect, I’d love to hear where it falls short.
Product Hunt
Trace
@curiouskitty If someone already has RSS, newsletters, and a tight setup, they can make that work — but it still takes ongoing effort.
T
race is for people who don’t want to keep tuning the system. You read, skip, and interact, and the feed adapts on its own. One place to check, less manual curation, less noise over time.
The people who won’t switch: power users who enjoy maintaining their stack. If curating feeds is part of the fun, Trace will feel unnecessary.
Agnes AI
Nice tool to get awar from most of noises ! how frequent will trace refresh the content feed?
Trace
@cruise_chen Trace has two agents. The reflection agent that runs every midnight to figure out what you liked and what didn't based on your interactions with the feed and a feed generator agent that runs every morning to curate a new feed daily for you :)
Trace
@vouchy Yeah. Way too often.
For me it was usually Twitter or YouTube. I’d open it to check one post or one video, and suddenly I’d burned half an hour, felt overstimulated, and still hadn’t seen the thing I actually cared about.
That frustration is what led to Trace. I wanted a place where I could keep up with my interests, get the signal, and then leave. Not fight an algorithm that’s trying to keep me there.
Congrats on the launch! Love how Trace unifies noisy feeds and surfaces only high-signal content that actually aligns with my work.
Trace
@zeiki_yu Thank you! I am glad you find it useful
In addition to the mainstream platforms mentioned, will more specialized or niche information sources be supported in the future—such as industry-specific forums, paid subscription feeds, and academic databases?
Trace
@long_wang4 Yes — that’s very much part of the direction.
The goal isn’t to stop at big, public platforms. A lot of the best signal lives in smaller, niche places: industry forums, paid publications, research blogs, even academic sources.
The tricky part is doing this without turning Trace into a giant manual setup. My bias is to add support for deeper and more specialized sources once there’s enough signal to personalize them properly, so they don’t just become another noisy firehose.
So short answer: yes, niche and professional sources are planned. The focus is to bring them in thoughtfully, so they actually raise signal instead of increasing volume.
Swytchcode
Nice. How big is the memory for storing the info
Trace
@chilarai using firebase right now and there is no limit to store the info :)
Love the "signals not distractions" framing. How does the feedback loop work? Like, do I thumbs up/down content, or does it learn from what I actually click/read?
Trace
@andreitudor14 It's both! Thumbs up/down give strong signals, but it also learns from what you scroll past. If you see something but don't interact, those topics get slight decay.
Notes on downvotes get analyzed to understand why you didn't like something and create personal signals. Basically, the more you use it, the better it gets at surfacing signals (not distractions) that matter to you.
Trace
@andreitudor14 Glad that resonated 🙂
The feedback loop is mostly implicit by default. Trace pays attention to what you actually do: what you open, what you consistently skip, what you come back to. That signal compounds over time.
There are light explicit controls (like marking something as useful / not useful), but they’re meant as nudges, not constant training. You shouldn’t have to babysit it.
The guiding idea is:
your behavior > your clicks > your settings.
If you read something once, it won’t take over your feed. If you keep engaging with a type of content over time, it slowly earns more space.
The loop is designed to be quiet, gradual, and reversible — so curiosity doesn’t turn into noise.
Congrats on the launch! I like the intention-first approach here, a feed that informs without pulling you into endless scrolling is refreshing. How does Trace decide what not to show once it learns from my feedback?
Trace
@vik_sh Thanks — really glad that landed.
On the “what not to show” side, Trace is deliberately conservative. It doesn’t hard-block things just because of one signal. Instead, content that you consistently skip, don’t open, or bounce from quickly just loses priority over time and quietly fades out.
There’s also a bias against repetition and volume. Even if a topic is relevant, it won’t dominate the feed unless your engagement stays steady across days. The idea is to reduce noise by de-emphasizing what isn’t useful, not aggressively pruning the feed and risking blind spots.
So it’s less “you told me no once” and more “you’ve shown me, over time, that this isn’t worth your attention.”
For adjusting the feed based on user's signals, how strongly does it do this? I have a huge issue through Reddit and Instagram where I see something they may not be my main focus but that one particular piece of media was interesting and then suddenly I'm getting nailed with 90% of that content and I have to go out of my way to readjust my algorithm.
Trace
@devonlastapp This is a real concern, and it’s something I’m deliberately trying to avoid.
Trace doesn’t react hard to single interactions. One click or one read won’t suddenly flood your feed with more of the same. Signals are weighted over time, not instantly amplified.
Think of it more like:
repeated interest → gradual increase
one-off curiosity → mostly ignored
There’s also an explicit bias toward stability. The feed is damped so it doesn’t swing wildly just because something caught your eye once. If you stop engaging with a topic, it naturally fades without you having to “fix” anything.
The goal is that you never feel punished for being curious. You shouldn’t have to babysit the algorithm or undo accidental clicks. If that ever starts happening, that’s a bug, not expected behavior.