THE way we gather news has evolved a lot over the years; it actually predates this Web site as I've posted many GNU/Linux-related links on a daily basis since 2004 or 2005 (back then it was mostly in newsgroups/USENET, later social control media such as Digg.com).

"The Google monopoly in this area generally lowered Google's incentive to maintain any sort of proper quality control (same as in social control media)."I've seen the rise and fall of blogs, I've witnessed the demise of RSS feeds, and various incarnations of social control media -- partly responsible for this still-ongoing war on RSS.

Although Google barely advertises RSS feeds anymore (and the Google-funded Mozilla also reduced focus on such user-centric technology), they're still available, albeit sometimes a little hidden.

Google News is the only thing from Google that I still use because sadly there's no potent alternative to it (other than subscribing to many thousands of sites over RSS and then filtering the results, which can be a lot of computational work that barely scales for one user or few users).

In this video I explain how I manage to overcome the truly awful signal/noise ratio that plagued Google News in recent years. Sadly, they also started syndicating and including spam/plagiarism sites while delisting totally legitimate sites.

The Google monopoly in this area generally lowered Google's incentive to maintain any sort of proper quality control (same as in social control media). Spying increased too, but by blocking JS and redirections one can mitigate a bit.

That's just my personal experience. Let us know yours, e.g. in our IRC channels (incidentally, there this decent new article about IRC today). ⬆