Here’s something that appears slightly unsettling to me these days.

Recently I unsubscribed from a bunch of email-newsletters from Tech sites (which used to end up in my inbox at a regular interval) - and instead switched over to an RSS reader (Feeder from F-Droid), and added the feeds from as many of those Tech sites in my reader as I could.

My whole point for doing this was to ensure that I follow stuff on my own terms - and also I get all the feed in one place (one app) instead of those newsletter emails taking me to their individual Tech Sites.

And in spite of being old school, I always thought RSS to be cool tech, just like Radio!

Some of the tech sites I subscribed for newsletter are Android Authority, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, Digital Trends, Engadget, TechCrunch, TechRadar, PC World, Mashable,… You get the idea.

What I am noticing is that most of the feeds from these sites are blatantly “Promotional” in nature - e.g.

  • “The best robot vacuums for hardwood will keep those floors looking spiffy”

“The best home security camera ahead of Prime Day”

“Get a Microsoft Office lifetime license for/an all time low price”

“The best T-Mobile deals of October 2023”

“Best early October Prime day tech deals”*

…and don’t get me started about ExpressVPN sponsored posts…

Unsurprisingly, I do see that almost all of them carry sponsored/affiliated links.

Seriously ?? I can’t focus on just the tech news, and avoid these promotional BS ?

Would love to hear if anyone else experienced this, and any workaround there might be.

  • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    Definitely noticed this as well. Wish I could filter out articles by certain keywords/phrases that pop up a lot. I know that’s an option for some of the paid rss readers, but it should be a pretty simple feature from a code perspective, so I don’t want to pay for it. It might drive me to actually learn how to compile my own app. I also want to get rid of any sports news from my local newspaper cause it seems like 50% of what they put out is professional, college, and even high-school sports