Comment by _pctq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _pctq | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I've set up a RSS reader again just this week.

Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it, as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from websites I don't know about.

But lately, I saw more and more posts I wasn't interested in. Well, it always happened, but those made me wondering because they were posts about brands, or very specific products. Was this promoted content? I don't have a clue.

Be it promoted content or not, I realized I was vulnerable: anything could be pushed to me and I would think I see it because I'm interested in it. And I have no way of checking why something appears in my feed.

So I decided to get back to RSS, and realized I could still have the discovery of new sources using... google alerts. I can set a google alerts using the advanced search semantics of google search, and get the result as a RSS feed. This means I discover new sources and I can verify why it appeared (it matches my custom search). Best of both world.

And obviously, I can also subscribe to specific RSS feeds to be sure to not miss something I love.

> it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests

Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am not interested in.

I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them were about sports, which is way off the mark for me.

Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular, or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google account?

I also find that it gives me articles of ... Dubious quality

Are you logged in your google account while using google search? Also, do you often search using your phone?

It's been really accurate for me, providing news about things that are not especially "mainstream", like word embeddings, anything related to KDE or updates on games I'm currently playing. I do a lot of searches on my phone, maybe that's the reason.

Probably because you turn off tracking search history and targetted ads in your Google account's privacy settings

Being pro-active about telling it which topics or sources you don't like helps a lot. My only wish is to say that I don't like a specific article. Often I get an article on a topic from a source I generally like but the specific article is junk.

I've tried that with politics and sports, but it seems to be incapable of understanding what you DO NOT want to see.

It seems to be much more concerned about false negatives than false positives, showing you more instead of less simply because some metrics (like regional popularity) indicates you might like it.

When the last election's campaigns were ramping up, I went into my Google interests sections and made every effort to tell it I was disinterested in politics and the 2 big names. I only started getting MORE political content until it overwhelmed my feed. For a few months I tried swiping it all away whenever I checked, but seemed to get zero response. I then started telling it I'm not interested in any stories from any sources that report anything political. In other words, I blocked the mainstream media. It got significantly better, but it still tries to shoehorn in a few articles on these topics by pulling from obscure local news outlets that are from the other side of the country.

Do you share your computer with other people - kids, significant other, other family members? I find that has really ruined google's ability to consistently suggest me useful things across its products. My 8 year old daughter has especially ruined youtube for me.

I tried autoplay one time then fell asleep. History showed me that it had been playing trump videos for 6 hours. Donald then followed me around for 2 months. (My hypothesis is that youtube is gradually changing all of us into ufologists.)

The trick seems to do some search query then click a lot of videos in the result. That seems to force a new hand.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

You could also subscribe to superfeedr alerts - that is a paid service though.

definitely not enough "feed" for anyone

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