[hedora]

The trump spam is probably because you read trump spam just enough to make it display more trump spam.

Avoiding that is easier said than done: I used to pay for Apple News+, but ended up clicking on just enough clickbait to only get clickbait in my feed.

If they had a way to only allow certain news sources then I’d probably re-subscribe.

[nozzlegear]

I found that you can ignore news stories from certain outlets in Apple News, which I chose to do with certain celebrity gossip outlets that had been taking over my feed. Apparently this only replaces the stories with a placeholder that says "You've blocked this news source". Most of the time that's fine. But place that in the context of how they group related news stories in the feed: if you've got a group of news stories that reads "World War 3 has just started," "President So-and-so dies in attack," "You've blocked this news source," well, you might just be tempted to click on that blocked story. I'd rather they remove it from the feed entirely.

[hedora]

I noticed that.

The next problem is that news outlets are paid per click, so they have incentive to use dark patterns to get clicks.

The last straw for me were things like “Biden hog tied in back of pickup truck …” with “… tailgate mural” hidden behind the click.

If you fall for it once, they aggressively uprank similar news outlets in your feed.