I don't want personalized news, I use Google News for the exact opposite reason. I want to see semi-random headlines from a variety of source to increase my exposure to stories I might not have seen otherwise.
1. I haven't used Google news until today, but I believe that's what the "Headlines" tab at the bottom bar is for. It seems to just show you the major headlines from everywhere, no personalization or AI involved.
2. Every news story has a "Full Coverage" button on the bottom-right that pulls up that same story from a variety of stories, so you can get different perspectives.
I agree that injecting AI and personalization into news is an easy way to put yourself in a bubble, but it seems that Google has at least tried to give users the tools to minimize that.
Personalisation isn't inherently bad. For example, I have zero interests in sports, and I don't think I'm putting myself in a "bubble" for not wanting any sport related articles in my feed. I also may have niche interests, such as puzzle games, which a generic feed would never surface.
Where AI gets dangerous is focusing on either a single source, or providing one side of the story, but that's exactly what "Full coverage" attempts to solve as you mention.
Personalization does not arise from passive use. Consider the converse, articles from a list of user selected sources. That sounds more like personalized news. Besides Google News used to function that way so I think I should be entitled to my opinion of how it should function.
Oh, just found out that Google News has what you're looking for: go to headlines section.
I opened the app and found it weird that there were news about Taylor Swift, the British royal wedding and a lot of other topics that I'm not interested in. Then I noticed I was in the "headlines" section, and not the "for you" section.
I like(d) the raw news feeds from AP etc. I say liked because they all seem to be disappearing. Just give me a long list of the incoming headlines, I'll filter by scanning, thanks.
I am hesitant about raw news, I think context is at a minimum important. I would much rather read an article published 12-36 hours after the fact that is rich with context and detail. I have blocked CNN from my feeds for this reason, they place a high value on immediacy and I think this heavily degrades their content.
I agree completely, though I'd be happy for both styles to exist. For semi-random news from a wide variety of sources, I like https://www.memeorandum.com/
> I don't want personalized news, I use Google News for the exact opposite reason.
That's what I used to use google news for too. Then a few years ago, google "personalized" and "localize"d news to your area and it became pointless. Google news was especially great for international events in the early 2010s because you'd get international sources listed back then. So you could see the difference in coverage between our media and china's media and europe's media and middle east's media of the same event.
Now, google news is just mostly NYTimes and Washingtonpost stories. And considering they espouse the same message on pretty much everything, I stopped using google news.
I understand that google was heavily pressured by the news industry to push traffic to major US news sites, but I wish they would have given us the option to opt out of personalization and localization.
What's even more disappointing is that google search was updated to heavily favor local news. So if I search for "North korea news" or "syria news", the search result is ridiculously skewed to US news' perspective. They used to list forums, messageboards, etc on search for international events, but they scrubbed those from the search results.
Social media used to have alternate/external/foreign sources but after US media pressure, they've also "personalized" and localized.
It's amazing how easily the news industry has pressured tech companies into limiting what the public sees and hears.
I wish there was a news aggregate site which had a page per news event where it listed international coverage of the event.
> Now, google news is just mostly NYTimes and Washingtonpost stories.
What? This is certainly not my experience.
I just went to news.google.com in my desktop browser, and I clicked on the World section. On the Iran sanctions/deal story, there are several sources grouped together in one card. The top source is indeed Washington post but the same card also contains coverage from Mehr News Agency (which it highlights as "From Iran"), Reuters, The Hill, RollingStone.com, NYT (highlighted as "Opinion"), NEWS.com.au, and Associated Press.
If I click on "View full coverage", I get more sources, of course.
This was not my experience, my feed has been flooded by NYT and WSP stories. This normally wouldn't be a problem but these stories are often different takes on current events and the algorithm is bad serving related articles for these stories. The result is a feed full meta analysis about the news without the actual news.
> The top source is indeed Washington post but the same card also contains coverage from Mehr News Agency (which it highlights as "From Iran"),
Where are you from? In the NY area, all I see is US related. A couple of washingtonpost, a couple of nytimes, rolling stone, cnn, etc. Even in the expanded "view full coverage", I don't see mehr news.
> Reuters, The Hill, RollingStone.com, NYT (highlighted as "Opinion"), NEWS.com.au, and Associated Press.
So, no diversity? They all are essential one news agency masquerading as different news. Yes, even the australian source.
How about this, I wish I had better access to different echo chambers.
Reuters, The Hill, RollingStone.com, NYT (highlighted as "Opinion"), NEWS.com.au, and Associated Press along with the nytimes and washingtonpost are part of the same echo chamber. They all push the same message. I want to see what the other nations/regions are saying. I want different opinions/perspectives/news.
> Google news was especially great for international events in the early 2010s because you'd get international sources listed back then
I still get international sources (sometimes as the first source on a story , as on the Iran deal right now) on both the Google News & Weather app and the Google News desktop page. Strangely, the new Google News mobile page doesn't as much (and doesn't seem to expand to provide multiple sources for the same story the way it used and the other interfaces still do), and there's little consistency in sources, or even stories selected, between the three interfaces.
Just look at Wikipedia Current Events [1] or WikiTribune [2] if you want news that's relatively unbiased and current. Google has long since been biased/personalized.
This is exactly how I feel but I am located in the UK and sources can be really biased on how and what they report. I usually end up consulting several foreign news outlet including what our national media would qualify as not so reputable.
I thought Project Treble was supposed to make the updating process easier from an OEM point of view. If so I wish they supported the Nexus 5X and 6P for one more version.
Treble requires SoC vendors to provide drivers with explicit support. SoCs from Nexus devices aren't supported by Qualcomm so they simply can't be upgraded.
Then Google is free to give me an alternative device for development.
With the emulator broken, and the Nexus 5X unsupported, I am unable to assure that my apps work on Android P, and therefore I have no idea at all if they’ll crash or not.
But if they’ll crash, Google will punish me by downranking my score. A punishment for something I can’t do shit about.
Want me to continue? I’ve got a list of dozens of issues.
The problem isn’t speed (that’s something I could live with, but on Linux with KVM it’s faster than all my real devices anyway), but that it’s literally broken.
1.5 years. The Nexus 5X was still sold by Google 1.5 years ago.
And all the alternatives are significantly more expensive.
I’m building open source apps.
If I put ads in my apps or track my users I’d make thousands and could buy a phone easily.
But I’m trying to do the right thing, and have a monthly budget of $6 (current donation level via Patreon).
If you sell me a phone with Android P for one year of my app income (aka 72€), I’d take it. I’ll even put some of my own money on top, 250€, as I paid for the Nexus 5X, I am willing to pay.
It was released three years ago, which is the date you should use for figuring out the life span of a device. You should expect to get less time out of a phone that's already been out for a year and a half when you buy it.
In my country a used 1st generation Pixel can be had for less than the 5x was when it came out (~$300 vs $379). It's not ideal to have to buy used instead of new but it is doable. The Nokia appears to cost about the same price that the 5x did but im not sure it's easily available everywhere.
Anyways, your situation is unfortunate but I don't consider Google's actions to be egregious in this instance.
Is removing content the same as disallowing it in a robots.txt? Because they have an interesting article [1] disallowed in their robots.txt that was added a while after it was published.
Am I too late to point out that they have an article about sexual violence in the military[1] disallowed in their robots text[2]. I noticed this last summer and can't find a reason why, using Wayback Machine you can see it was added a while after publishing.
Removing something from search engine result pages but not from archives seems like a middle ground that media organizations might consider when people say "I regret having talked on the record about this, can you remove it?" or when they say "hey, this is hurting my reputation and it's not a big deal, can you please make it harder to find?".
I used to periodically poll The Harvard Crimson's robots.txt which until a 2015 site redesign used to exclude a lot of articles from search engine results. One example of an article excluded from search engine results for several years was http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/10/31/news-in-brief-s... , which also carries a lengthy editor's note with more info about the final disposition of the case and which I think I can see why the article subject might not want to affect their reputation.
Among the other things that the Crimson's web site excluded from search results included -- drug arrest stories where the final disposition was "not guilty" and the final article was not hidden (but the original arrest and intermediate reporting were); some deeply personal sex columns; maybe an unruly party story; a story about a grad student being rude at a football game.
I wasn't always able to find the articles -- one older piece of content, article id 523203 in their old-style format, was probably published in the print edition on 22 April 2008 based on the publication dates of article ids 523202 and 523204.
The Crimson seems to have stopped doing this and most media organizations don't do it; while excluding an article from robots.txt usually makes users' search engine results calm down, sometimes it can have the opposite effect by broadcasting exactly what in the archives people do not want to be seen.
60 Minutes did a segment on Huawei a couple of years ago where they discussed the extreme concerns intelligence officials had with Telcos using Huawei equipment. At the time it just seemed like a very strange segment, this was of course before the Snowden revelations. I have thought about that segment many times since the Snowden revelations and it starts to make sense why intelligence officials where so concerned.
I recall seeing that segment. If I remember correctly it was focused on the Chinese stealing trade secrets and intellectual property from US companies. One example they gave was Cisco source code that was found in Huawei network devices.
