Google News

So, I discovered that if I disable Google News’ direct integration with my Android OS, that also kills the ability for my Android Auto to read texts to me live, because voice services depend on the underlying service that I need to disable to stop swiping left from taking me to Google’s News.

As bad as desktop OSes have become, they have nothing on the unchecked depravity of the phone ecosystem.

So, now that Google News is re-enabled, I periodically swipe in to it, but it’s quite bad. First of all, it mandates a use of a Chrome WebView for all of its news, one without adblock, and if you’ve ever tried to read a news article from any modern outlet without adblock you’ll know exactly why this is a huge problem:

Some news sources (The Globe and Mail in particular) will offer up a juicy-sounding headline, but then ask you to subscribe to actually read the article - fair play, if irritating.

The National Post will give you its conservative punditry for free, so that’s good news if you’re looking for someone who was willing to claim even yesterday morning that the USA is still the #1 liberal democracy in the world and that it is foolish of Canada not to cozy up to the regime

Every Nth article is “sponsored”, which is to say, a “news” article that’s actually a thinly disguised ad. These ads are supposed to use Google’s data collection to laser target me, but since apparently nobody is that interested in appealing to middle-aged Canadian nerds, I’ve instead got ads for astrology, elderly gay singles dating, and the same Indian scam website pretending to be the CBC dozens of times (I report it every time but Google can not outsmart these scammers)

Actually looking at the quality of the real articles - well, it’s free news, and you get what you pay for nowadays. Regardless of the topic of interest, most of the news articles are a headline, a shit-tonne of ads, and then a cursory under-200-word article that might as well have been generated directly from the headline. If you’re looking for in-depth long-form or even medium-form writing, here is not where you should be looking.

If you’re Canadian, you can install the CBC app and just have access to free medium-form reporting with comparatively unintrusive advertising, and, like, a whole article attached to each headline they bother to write, although their scope and breadth tends to be quite limited: it’s explicitly Canadian News, some limited regional news. Like CBC Gem, it replaces American hypercapitalist flash and glitz with a unique kind of Canadian unmemorable mediocrity that will have you forgetting it exists.

Wait, Scam Website?

The conceit of the Indian scam website is - okay, I feel like you need to strap in for this - so, it’s a CBC news article about a man who accidentally revealed a money-making Android application SO POWERFUL that it would crash the global economy by making too many millionaires too fast, news reports everywhere of people spending just $350 to make infinity dollars, and the Bank of Canada had to step in to censor this information to preserve global stability.

but, of course, now the CBC is covering the Bank of Canada cover-up and revealing how you, too, can get in on this sweet deal for only a seed investment of three hundred and fifty Canadian dollars

All of the comments are, of course, also plants, saying things like “wow, I thought this was a bunch of horseshit but now I have $25,000 in a cheque I am holding in my hands right now” - obviously a ruse because the CBC only allowed human comments on their sites for 15 disastrous minutes in 2008.

The whole thing is also very badly and childishly written, and looking at the site and the content I can’t help but think “I could do this more convincingly”, but I KNOW that’s actually the wrong impulse because this kind of scam actually enormously benefits from pitches that are so dumb that only very gullible people are sucked in.