[hedora]

I don’t use Google, but I used to pay for Apple News.

Apple uses algorithmic ranking by story, and pays news sites by article views. It is basically all spam. If you block the spam sites, their stories still show up in your feed with a note that you blocked the site.

Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization, like podcast apps do. They should steer you back to reading the sources you’ve opted into, and mix in a bit of stories from related news organizations, not stories with high content similarity, or high “trending” scores.

(As far as I know, Apple News+ is the only product still operating in the paid news aggregator space, but if there’s another one, I’d love to hear about it.)

[saghm]

I've been using Feedly for a bit now after something changed with the Google aggregator that Android has available as an option on the home screen changed something and became impossible for me to filter out certain sources from (maybe related to the engine changes discussed in this thread and in the article?)

It's solidly...okay. It's very good aggregating everything I want, and for the most part it's able to avoid things that I'd absolutely not be willing to overlook, but it has some quirks in terms of the filters weirdly not working for me on fairly benign topics (no matter how much I try, I can't get it to stop showing me content from various sports like soccer, basketball, and golf despite the only sport I care about being baseball). They seem to really hype their AI features in the app, which is a little weird because I don't care how they aggregate behind the scenes and they shouldn't need AI to be able to filter articles they literally already tag as "golf" when I have "golf" listed in my filters as "never show", but it's not annoying enough that I've bothered trying to find an alternative yet.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

I have to say showing you content from blocked channels is the most user hostile thing I encounter on a daily basis.

The contempt for one’s users is such a defining feature of this era of late-stage tech.

[gamacodre]

> Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization

Doesn't this immediately turn into the kind of problem TFA is bemoaning? Once a news organization gets traction (opt-ins in this case) on a platform, they'll inevitably start selling space in their feed to one or more crappy aggregators. To the C-suite this looks like free money, since somehow they always manage to convince themselves that the brand damage from it will be minimal or at least manageable.

It sucks.

[lupusreal]

> If you block the spam sites, their stories still show up in your feed with a note that you blocked the site.

Users' respect for Apple is matched in magnitude by Apple's disrespect for users.