Blocking trash newspapers in Apple News+ just disables the link but doesn't free up screen space.

Yes this truly is the weakest bullshit I’ve ever seen. Obviously, it’s just in-client blocking with zero support from the back end. Pathetic.

Hey, looks, a reason to uninstall Apple News+

To be fair, the magazines available on News+ are great. I have Apple One because it covers all the household’s music/storage/fitness solutions for a reasonable price (considering how many people are on my subscription). News+ is included, and the list of magazine subscriptions bundled within it is surprisingly extensive. The app’s not perfect though, as this crappy design shows.
- Tip: Your local public library offers the same electronic versions of magazines through an app called Hoopla. For free.
Unequivocally my least used part of apple one.
- Apple Arcade for me

Apps like Apple News don't exist to help you curate news that you want to see. They exist to curate news that they want you to see.

They exist to push ads. Even the premium version of Apple News has ads.
- Isn’t it the publications themselves that contain the ads rather than the app itself?
Not sure I’d agree, as the sources are configurable, but this sort of shit is far from a great user experience.

Use an rss feed!

Got any suggestions how to get started on that?
- For mobile, I like Feedly.
- I’m hosting a dockerized image of freshrss on my server which I can access as a webapp on my phone.
  
  I believe there are plenty of phone apps and websites that can do the same! :) I would search rss app in the App Store. If they’re FOSS I would consider that better.
  
  Can add feeds for anything! I have news, YouTube, podcasts, Lenny, and some reddit
- I have a really comprehensive list of RSS feeds for different topic. That I have been updating and pruning since 2010, I use Read You on Android and a GNOME Circle app on Linux (can't recall the name tbh)
- Download NetNewsWire. If you need it to sync with a windows machine and/or an android device, store your feeds in Feedly or a similar service. Learn to set your RSS reader to default to “reader mode” so you see the whole story and not just the first paragraph.

Oh fuck it's spreading. I hadn't seen this pattern before until I started using LinkedIn for job hunting (it's what Australia uses, trust me I'm more unhappy than you are lol). We won't show you this job again....until the next time you're on this page again, which you'll need to check every day because despite sorting by date we're still gonna shuffle jobs you haven't seen yet inside a dozen pages of jobs you've already seen. I assume it drives "engagement" or some bullshit, hooray for monopolies! 😡

Had to make a fucking uBO rule www.linkedin.com##li:has-text(/show you this job again./)

Just use an RSS feed reader. Apple News is legit trash.

Apple News is one of the most poorly managed of all the Apple products. Whomever is in charge of it should be fired.

RSS should become popular again. There are great clients for all platforms, even iOS:

NetNewsWire (iOS/macOS)
Read You (Android)
RSS Guard (Linux/Windows)

I also recommend using the Awesome RSS extension in Firefox/LibreWolf to quickly see if a website has an RSS feed. It also works in Firefox Mobile/Fennec/Mull.

Thanks for the heads-up, giving RSS Guard a try as we speak. Looks fun.
Yes! And I recommend Unread (iOS/macOS + Local/Cloud service)
- Is is open source though?
Thunderbird still supports RSS, however I've found many news sources don't provide proper RSS feeds anymore

At least google news actually stops showing you stories from the publications you remove. This is just bad.

I wish they’d let me block entire topics, though. I don’t ever want a horoscope but it puts that shit in front of me every single day.
- Ikr right? "fewer stories like this" bitch please, how about I get no more of this shit instead???
- Interesting. I mindlessly swipe over to the news feed on my Pixel more than I'd like to admit, and it only gives me horoscope type stuff very rarely... Definitely not frequently enough for me to bother trying to block it. I wonder why you're seeing so much more of it?

Can't block YouTube channels on anything but browser...

Wow, it's more useless than blocking someone on Discord.

No idea how Discord's blocking works since I've luckily never needed it. What makes it so useless?
- When someone you block types a message, you get a "message blocked" message instead, with a link to show the message. You can't actually block someone on Discord.
- it gives you the ability to see their messages still (i think)

Why are you using that crap, then?

I mean, this is specifically mildly infuriating, and there are other positives to it.

Same for news taking up space in the Stocks app.

These seem to go away the next day don’t they?

My problem is I don’t live where it thinks I do for local news and it won’t let me change it.

Disclaimer: I don’t use News+. This is just what I think I remember from some podcast episode a while ago.

IIrc: it only does this for the Top Stories feed which is a handful of stories handpicked by Apple. It would be weird if your Top Stories was super short or completely blank because you happened to block all the right sources. Your regular feed should be filtered.

Thing is though, There’s plenty of sources I haven’t blocked. It’s basically just the Daily Mail and a shitty red-top, so I can’t believe they only curate the sources that I’ve blocked. In which case the feed should consist of headlines from the other huge array of other news sources.

I blocked ESPN news articles just because I don't want to see sports content. Does the same thing. They need to fix this stupid shit.

On the other hand, I'm willing to pay for aggregated news to gain access to articles from the likes of The Atlantic, etc. Anyone have alternatives to Apple News+ in this regard?

If you wanna put the work into an rss feed, netnewswire is great.

Settings -> News -> Restrict Stories in Today

This will fix it so that only news services you follow will appear.

Cheers - this would work, but first requires whitelisting all the sources you’re happy to see news from, rather than simply not showing you news from sources you’ve blocked.

Google News does the right thing here. I presume it's cross platform but haven't tried on an iDevice.

oh no, linekar is leaving motd? first wrighty, now him?

i don't think shearer and micah can pull it off themselves going forward. they're both good but, let's face it, neither has the gravitas needed to anchor the show.

My money’s on Chappers filling in.

apple

Cringe as always.