Privacy

31871 readers

417 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Encountering mostly promotional articles in tech RSS feed (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Flym decsync has a blacklist