Since I am doing my best to give up on social media I decided to look for news sites to read. This would give me different sites to check and let me stay informed. It would also save me the hassle of filtering out bullshit from people pretending to be others by paying for Twitter Blue. With that said, I am having an issue where every news site kind of sucks ass. I know I can just use Google News, but my Google News keeps showing me celebrity news and other things I don’t care about. It seems like a glitch when it shows me a news story I am interested in. I am also trying to ditch Google News. I want to help lessen Silicon Valley’s control on the net. The problem with that is news media groups are making that really fucking hard to do.
Today I read a pretty nice editorial about AMD fumbling the ball. The author wrote about how they want to ditch Nvidia but the whole RDNA 3 series of GPUs suck. They either suck at a performance level, or with pricing. Not only are they barely priced below Nvidia, while being weaker, they don’t even have a 7700 or 7800 on the market. This means if you want to buy an AMD GPU your choices are their expensive top of the line cards or bottom tier cards. There are no decent upper midrange performance cards on the market for RDNA 3. Meanwhile NVIDIA has from the 4090 all the way down to the 4060 on the market, including TI variants for all except the 4090. I had never actually noticed this about AMD’s RDNA 3, so the article was really interesting to me. Before I added the website to my bookmarks I decided to look at the front page and that’s when the illusion broke.
All down the front page was “5 things you never knew about this actor”, “Nvidia in deep trouble?,” and tons more clickbait/listicles for all types of articles. I found the non-tech stuff to be really weird, because it was supposed to be a tech site. I went back to the AMD article and noticed everything linked to an external website, with a few links to internal articles. The entire “editorial” was just an SEO piece. Needing to convince myself further I decide to look up the author and all of their social media accounts are blank. They advertised themself as an “SEO Wizard” and then I noticed their picture looked weird, almost like it was made by This Person Doesn’t Exist. The author’s bio on the website finished mid word, which was really weird. I figured Google News must’ve fed me some blog posing as a news site. So, I decided to verify the website. Yes, I was on the real Digital Trends. I remember reading Digital Trends a long time ago and them being an actual legitimate news source. When Googling Digital Trends authenticity I found they paid to have their own website answer the question if Digital Trends is a trustworthy news source. This whole experience encapsulates my issue with modern news sites.
For every well written piece there are 35, this is not meant to be an exaggeration but an honest guestimate, bait and listicle posts. They also pay to make their website look more authentic when Googling them by answering questions through their own website, or websites owned by their sister sites. Every website is so greasy it’s not even funny. Even if I decided to read a website with a few good editorials a week I would need to fish through so many bullshit posts to even have a chance of finding news I am interested in. They post a fuckton of shitty clickbait articles an hour that it would be impossible to find the articles I would like, unless I made that my job. There’s also the chance that the well written article could just be an SEO bait post.
If you’re curious why an SEO post is bad, that’s simple. You can’t trust what they say because they’re paid to send you to other websites, or purchase specific items. Often SEO posts are sponsored posts, but not disclosed as such. When rereading the AMD post it felt like a sponsored post, especially after noticing all of the SEO shit. I have had requests to write SEO posts, and I’ve never done it. They offered me $5 to write posts linking to specific websites. I know these websites are getting paid for these posts, even if it’s not from AMD or NVIDIA. Store fronts, review sites, and more will pay to just have you link to their website disguised as an article to trick your readers into going. This is one of the reasons why I rarely link to other sites. I don’t want people to think I’m an SEO tool.
Something not talked about a lot is how awful niche hobby sites have become. Many niche sites are nothing more than SEO sites disguised as a news site. Sometimes they’re heavily influenced by the site owner’s personal politics too. Which means they’re just censored SEO sites. Do you want the latest Nintendo news? Good luck finding a dedicated Nintendo news site that isn’t a scam. Same with Xbox and Playstation. Oh man, looking for the latest skateboarding or guitar news? Get prepared to only read SEO posts about how the latest BirdHouse board will cure cancer or how the latest Boss Pedal sounds better than a Klon. It’s impossible to stay up to date in hobbies without being on social media these days, and even then there’s lots of fake news surrounding these topics on social media. This includes YouTube, before everyone tells me to just watch YouTube.
Before you suggest paying for news, let me go over those gripes. I don’t mind paying for news. However, the subscription fees are pretty pricey and I would need to subscribe to multiple news sites to get the full story. Which brings me to another issue I have with modern news: censorship. Which I’ve talked about before. It’s annoying when I need to read the same piece of news on different websites to check what was removed. People are letting their personal politics ruin the news, doesn’t matter which industry, which just ruins their credit. Yes, both paid and free news have this issue. I don’t want to pay for a sub and get fed censored news. Nevermind some paid news sites still had ads and they refuse to cover what my niche interests are. A lot of paid news sources refuse to cover indepth technology, music, and video games, because these topics are below them.
Finally we have the biggest issue: ads. I do not mind viewing ads to help your website out. What I do have an issue is when your article is a giant ad. I also have an issue when your website has more ads on it than a 90s porn site did. Modern news sites are riddled with so many ads that I need to use an adblocker because it takes way too long for the website to load, because of the ads. Then there’s all the overlay pop-in ads and autoplaying videos. Which, how is that legal? You know they’re telling people, “Our video ads get X views a month!” to sell more ad space, but it’s all fake. Those ads autoload and will pop-in over the article you’re trying to read. Companies need to inverstigate who they’re buying adspaces from because y’all are getting fucked over. If there was just a simple banner ad and mid roll ads I wouldn’t use an adblocker but all news sites are lousy with them, down to ads disguised as news posts.
I would love to support news sites again, but they make it so fucking hard. Between censorship, clickbait, and SEO posts it’s hard to actually find news these days. Even paid sites are dogshit. Sure, I can go to Yahoo news, CBS, or some other main stream media but I am not looking for that kind of news. Often they refuse to write about what I am interested in, and when they do they’re often wrong/missing tons of info. This forces me into these hobby based news sites where everything is fucking awful. I feel bad for people getting into hobbies these days because there’s too many fake posts disguised as news/honest reviews. People are buying shitty products because of SEO listicles. People are getting wrong information because of SEO bait and switch posts, or rage bait posts. Even as an old timer to some of my hobbies it’s getting impossible to find news sites to read.