- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Not terribly surprised. When I tried the app out I didn’t really get the appeal. It was like adding a comments section to existing news feeds and didn’t provide enough tailoring or algorithmic understanding of reading habits to be a compelling offering.
Besides the fact that they were using a chrome embedded browser, meaning I couldn’t even ad block on the sites I visited: which made the reading experience nearly impossible.
It had a built in reader mode to bypass the shitty ad-ridden websites. My favorite feature was the block words list. No more stories with the word “kardashian” for example.
Must’ve come after I gave it a shot: I picked it up pretty soon after release.
The main attraction for me was the reader mode which blocks all ads, it also pushes similar articles from different new sites that I have never heard before (its a nice thing).
Firefox has reader mode and uBlock origin on mobile ;)
I found it worked pretty well, seemed to understand my interests pretty well after a couple days, when I usually don’t feel that way, having tried many many similar apps. The chrome web view wasn’t ideal, but I use pihole which helped :)
What are the best news aggregators that people use these days? I have fallen back to using news.google.com, which Im not that too happy about, but it does seem to work ok for me.
But mostly I’ve started just monitoring dozens of RSS feeds with the Feeder RSS app (android)
It’s a shame. It was a good news aggregator. Much better than the news app included with iOS. You’d think if they lost the comments section/moderation and added some ads and a premium ad-free tier, it could’ve stayed in business. Also surprised they didn’t find a buyer who’d want to slap their name on existing tech.
I tried it as a replacement to Apple News and found it to be much worse.
As the other comment said, the “AI” integration was poorly implemented and didn’t allow enough tailoring to make it worth it.
The comments and social features shouldn’t have been implemented.
On top of that, it didn’t have big news publishers like the Atlantic. Had plenty of listicle BS from sites I’d never heard of before. As I scrolled through I found myself thinking “who TF is this?”.
I rather enjoyed it while it lasted but I was rather just posting interesting bits I was posting here, so perhaps here is the best alternative. 🤷
I may have also been using it as a kind of replacement for del.icio.us, which is much missed. I gave Postmarked a go but it isn’t doing it for me.
