Today looking at the Kagi News articles for the Finland category, 9 out of 12 are sports. If I wanted to follow sports I would follow the Sports category.
If articles were tagged for categories instead of assigned only one, I could perhaps make a "has:Finland not:Sports" view. For ease of use in practice this could be implemented keeping the current categories but displaying other identified categories/tags at the top of the individual article. Tapping/clicking them would bring up a selector offering to exclude said tag from the main category view, or to create a new advanced view showing only the combination of the main and selected category. The advanced view could then surface the option to also add other tags as well.
The magic portion would be detection and prioritization of which tags to assign an article and in what order to surface them in the UI. Given the heavy use of LLMs and existing category logic I was already expecting this to be in the product, so I feel like most of the pieces are already there and the remainder is good UX.
I expect the primary use would be eliminating sub-categories of news from main category views that people are trying to avoid either for personal preference or personal safety. Being able to stay aware of say technology news while ignoring news on cryptocurrency for example, but still interested if it pops up in your local country category.
The other usage could be system wide exclusions, "I am sick and tired of reading about Trump" is a common sentiment and a common filter people put in place for example on social media. While a free text exclusion might be more powerful, I expect tag exclusion would be more approachable and similar to other app based news services people may be used to. (I only know of a local example: "YLE Uutisvahti" was very popular partially due to this very feature)
