It's time to head back to RSS?

Re:It's time to head back to RSS? by wyclif on Saturday March 31, 2018 @06:56AM (#16722771)

A lot of people don't seem to be aware of it, but you can "tune" Google News by adding or deleting sources. I've tweaked mine quite a bit and it works well as a lazy news source. It's not as finely granulated as my RSS consumption, and it won't replace my RSS reader, but it's better than I at first thought it would be after adjusting the defaults.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:It's time to head back to RSS? by awiesenhofer on Saturday March 31, 2018 @07:37AM (#16722858)

After having to remove "recommended" news sources and articles all the time I decided to "tune" it by deinstalling the Google Search App altogether therefore removing News. I use feedly instead now and am quite happy with the added battery runtime.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:It's time to head back to RSS? by gabuzome_ on Sunday April 01, 2018 @05:34AM (#16727504)

Funny story, Google News, the web interface seems to have been abondonned by Google. The normal web interface that is, don't know about mobile. The "Sources" preference on news.google.com has a bug - whenever you try to block a new source, it replaces the old one, so you can only ever block one source at a time :D

Which isn't sufficient as their feed keeps showing material from Daily Mail and similar garbage. Skipping it manually isn't a problem, but it does take the space of meaningful news reports.

Users sent countless bug reports and started many threads on their forums since around June 2017, no reply. Nowadays I just aggregate aljazeera and reuters, way more efficient.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:It's time to head back to RSS? by wyclif on Sunday April 01, 2018 @10:10PM (#16731791)

Not true. I just added a random number of blocked sources and none of them were replaced. Currently blocking 5 or 6 different sites. Chrome version 65.0.3325.181.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:It's time to head back to RSS? by gabuzome_ on Monday April 02, 2018 @08:36AM (#16733967)

Heh, I guess they prefer you. Just tested with chromium 65.0.3325.181 and the bug is there. Have you tried leaving and coming back to the preference page?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:It's time to head back to RSS? by wyclif on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:27AM (#16742343)

Yes, I have. Quit and restarted Chrome. There's no bug. I'm afraid there's no way to reproduce the behaviour you describe.

I have Fox News, Daily Mail, CNN, and a number of other sources blocked. No issues whatsoever.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:It's time to head back to RSS? by gabuzome_ on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @05:04AM (#16742978)

Interesting. So it's only broken for a small subset of people, which explains why they never even bothered answering. I suppose it is tied to my account then, since various laptops and browsers gave me the same behavior.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:It's time to head back to RSS? by washadjeffmad on Saturday March 31, 2018 @08:31AM (#16723019)

I've given up on that but haven't sought alternatives. I'm not sure what began influencing my feed, but even after removing sources, choosing what was useful and what I wasn't interested in, it still mainly gives me popular and political news, which were never set in my interests.

Other than that, it gives me information that's a day late, which makes things like one-day sales notifications for not useful.

I've largely switched to podcasts to make up for the content gap but would be interested in a aggregator that didn't try so hard to be smart.

[ Parent | on HN ]