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Betanews.com - What was once a great site, is no longer
JavaJones:
Their RSS feed no longer has whole articles either, just summaries, forcing you to click to their site to actually read the content (and the summaries are usually awful). Not that I blame them, the RSS feed used to be a very convenient way to avoid seeing all their annoying pop-over ads. Now I just use an ad blocker. ;) But so rarely is the content useful that I am definitely considering removing them from my RSS soon. Slashdot is kind of sucking too.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a good general tech (and other) news site with an RSS feed? I want something fairly broad, that includes both tech/geek-specific stuff and *some* "real news" so I'm not totally out of touch, plus the occasional bit of humor. Like Slashdot, only without really terrible/slanted/biased article summaries and a bunch of duplicates.
- Oshyan
Josh:
Have you ever tried accessing BN on a mobile device (tablet, smartphone, etc)? The "full page ads" are not removable. There is no way to close them on my android phone. I am all for a site making money through advertising and disable my ad blocker for sites with respectable and non-obnoxious ads, but BN has taken advertisement to a whole new, and highly annoying level.
What annoys me is their TOS which says if for any reason you disagree with BN, your sole course of action is to cease visitation. That sounds very pro-customer/viewer.
I am also up for some good new tech sites to get my news from so I can cut slingload from these sites which just attempt to garner clicks.
Shades:
I mostly rely on Dutch tech sites as they appear to be faster than Slashdot most of the time anyway.
Maybe with Google translate the following sites are an option for you? Tweakers.net and WebWereld
40hz:
@Josh- the mobile thing is annoying. I hit a site on my iPhone over the weekend that kept looping a popup for you to "like" their product on Facebook. It completely took over Safari. You couldn't close either the popup or the underlying web page. Exiting to the desktop didn't fix it, nor did purging the cache, history, and cookies. I had to restart the device, then immediately launch the browser and close the page before I could get rid of it. Fun way to waste 5 minutes figuring it out.
At first I thought it was just me or this particular website. Then I saw some comments in a few other places talking about this new marketing technique of "forcing a like" some sites are now pulling. :-\
zridling:
Josh, you're right on every count. However, I'm much more fickle. I actually left the site years ago when then changed the page design and colored FileForum orange. It was so "GeoCities" on my eyes that I gave up. I was also switching to Linux at the time, and it didn't help that they when viewing the latest 100 updated apps, you're thrown into a confusing screen full of boxes -- WTF! Like so many news sites, the intent seemed to get visitors to click-thru several screens to get where they wanted.
And BetaNews, whoa! I just looked at today's page for the first time in years, too. Virtually every headline is an opinion rather than a description. They're doing it wrong!
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