Microsoft launches a personalized news service, Microsoft Start
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Personalized news feeds destroy that commonality. Undoubtedly, those limited options were (and are) biased, and more solid information is available today. But that commonality had a value independent of conveying information.
Aside from all of that, I don't want news sources trying to predict what I want to read, because a major aspect of my news reading is looking at how various sources are spinning things. I read a lot of material I disagree with. "Services" that try to guess how I prefer to be gaslit are counterproductive.
In an ideal world news organizations would just provide both sides of a side, but unfortunately in todays world news agencies seem incredibly polarized and twist stories to suite their agendas. This now makes personalized news feeds even more scary and further contributes to the kind of polarization we see happening now. People seem more divided then ever in the last 20-30 years.
Personalized news feed are making this worse, but it's not a new thing.
The tragedy of the commons is that nobody cares about the maintenance of the common good: I posit that the common good ought to include shared myths. Historically, this meant shared worldview and religion. Today, we are challenged to find other bases for trust in one another.
The web and partisan cable news channels have long since done away with that commonality. It's dead, buried, and cold in the ground. That's why it feels like one side of the political spectrum is living in the world of Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, and so on, while the other side is living in the world of CNN, MSNBC, Huffington, Vox, and so on.
There are some very good attempts [0] to make media bias more visible, but people who have already decided that Fox and Newsmax are centrist and OANN is right-leaning are not going to evaluate things fairly anymore.
The Adfontes Media Bias chart uses a two-axis system, plotting accuracy against bias, and inevitably ending up with most sources on an inverted-V shape: https://adfontesmedia.com
Unfortunately, Pew's list is not consistently updated like the Adfontes chart and other media-bias checking sites.
[0]: https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/
If you ever had a friend growing up whose family was devoutly religious, you might have seen something similar: They run in totally different circles, all their friends are from their church, they take their kids to totally different movies, listen to totally different music. Can't talk sports with them because they literally can't name a football team. No culture overlap at all. Totally siloed off in their own world. That's what's happening with all this personalization and alternative news sources now, but instead of a small group of very religious people, it's 30-40% of the country!
I'm surprised that MS didn't say Making it Easier, Faster, Better, More Open, and those things.
Computers are pretty good at telling you what you want to know, because they work off of your existing feedback. What they're terrible at is telling you what you should know, and what is important.
If the same systems that recommend the news were used to deliver the weather, every forecast would be "Sunny and 72 degrees." In other words, useless.
Maybe not this specific instance but in general having 5 newspapers to choose from and 15 channels was awful compared to now.
No way...this is absolutely insane. If you are on a Mac, go to MicrosoftStart.com on Safari. (Safari on iOS is an equally laughable result)
They gave MSN a fresh coat of paint and broke it for half their potential audience. Truly an astounding feat of engineering. I'm crying thinking of the engineers and PMs who probably got promoted after this announcement.
It is a act of genius to change a "news" app to have "groceries" button displayed left, right and center instead of showing some "news".
I think they should add an "laundry" button. Maybe even a "garbage sorting" button so we have to a place to put this Groceries app, sorry news app.
PS: I have been using this news app on a daily basic since it was called "MSN News Beta" some many years (> 10?) ago. When I first saw the redesign with the Grocery link, my first thought was "they got a new product manager that wants to fix something that wasn't broken". Because of the grocery link I have now stopped using it, at that "feature" really really annoys me.
Just display some freaking news for crying out loud and leave the grocery shopping to another apps.
[1] What the IOS news app look like the first 10 seconds after launch. It has always displayed news at start up. Now you can do your groceries instead. https://imgur.com/a/XYvYq88
Happily I - and the rest of the immediate family - only use Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC (previously LTSB) and don't have Edge!
I'm confident we will all enjoy missing out on this latest _enhancement_ :)
But I'm phasing out Microsoft on my computers - even overlooking all the crappy ads and shady telemetry, they fundamentally don't build usable account systems.
"Microsoft accounts" are really bad. And I'm not even talking about the 'personal' or 'work/school' split, which is also horrible. I'm talking about having multiple different accounts with different names. I've worked hard to only have one private one. But since I have three different ones through work, I've discovered a few fun things.
When all accounts have the same initials (from my name), it's usually impossible to see which one you're logged in as.
Teams generally crashes when you try to change accounts, and notifications don't work properly across accounts.
Signing in to a WinUI "modern" app is really scary, as it might "take over" your whole computer and render other apps semi-unusable if you're not using those with the Microsoft account you just signed in with
Sign-in browser views generally don't show up in the window list, and generally don't explain why you're asked to sign in, or what app you're signing in to. The window list thing is a UI annoyance, the lack of information is a security issue. And also makes me sign in with the wrong account when I guess wrong. Oh, this wasn't Teams, it was Git. Oops, other account.
Also, Microsoft wants me to always be signed in to their system when I'm just using my computer at home, offline. It's mentally taxing. I don't want to keep track of 43 different privacy settings to make sure I don't have a "Created 10 PowerPoint slide transitions" badge visible on my "profile" or whatever. But I understand that last issue might be less important for other people.
I will be running this VM until I don't care about these machines anymore.
Aside from that and Excel at work, MS still has no other role in my life.
It also usually means ads.
Articles that have had a lot of time & effort put into them.
Articles where the author didn't spend 90% of the time on the headline & lede.
Articles whose goal is to educate not just get views.
What I don't want is some random list of click bait articles meant to sell ads. This seems to be what most of these services end up as.
I haven't tested whether the site works in Safari if you spoof a non-Safari User-Agent string.
It does not.
It's weird how they didn't reuse start.com, which now redirects to microsoftstart.com.
Apple News is great, but they don't have top content anymore. NyTimes is a specific example that I used to be able to read, but can't without paying now. It's like how streaming started out, but now it's a bunch of add on fees.
Sounds like this starts with only MSN?
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/09/07/the-c...
It's fine to try driving some Bing / Edge traffic (like they did with the "News & Interest" crap in Win10) as long as an opt-out remains.
I'll give it a few months before questions about content moderation arise.
can't improve perfection