Hot take: Apple News is good.
@jsonbecker I think it's quite useful for what it does. Far from a perfect app, but it sort of reminds me of early Flipboard (an app I've not touched or looked at in years, so no clue what it's like now).
@dgreene196 yup. I open once every day or two. Scroll through some headlines, click on one or two links, play my puzzle, and I’m out. Great way to get a small diet of “regular” news versus the stuff I follow.
@jsonbecker Yeah, I’ve become a pretty big fan since starting to use it regularly a few months ago. My use case is basically the same as yours. When I do find myself getting annoyed, it is about the torrent of clickbait headlines but that is the publications’ fault, not that of the app itself.
@canion @jsonbecker Two easy things you can do to improve the experience.
Block the ads. It’s really easy to block all the ads using a free account and free app like NextDNS: 1. Download app 2. Create account at NextDNS 3. Add these domains to the deny list of your configuration (you set this up on their website) news.iadsdk.apple.com, iadcontent.apple.com, iadsdk.apple.com 4. Open NextDNS app and enable it.
Next, if you block a news source you still get the annoying placeholder boxes for those stories with a reminder that you blocked the source. The fix: there is an option for Apple News in the settings app to “Restrict Stories” which will hide stories from sources you do not follow. This fixes the problem of the blank placeholders.