home | list info | list archive | date index | thread index

Re: canadian news funding, maybe a free open source news aggregator app as part of a funding model solution?

  • Subject: Re: canadian news funding, maybe a free open source news aggregator app as part of a funding model solution?
  • From: jf [ at ] messier [ dot ] ca
  • Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2023 12:43:34 -0400
WARNING: This post will contain NSFW language. Do not read further if that bothers you. :)

I never liked reading my news of interest mixed with fake news, useless cats videos and other supposedly fun stuff. Since the creation of Google News that was perhaps the ancestor of news aggregator, I had all my news web sites of interest aggregated into a single web page. The beauty was (and is still today) that I quickly overlook the titles, and only open the ones that I am interested in, on separate tabs.

Fast forward to 2023, Google News is no more what it used to be, but several aggregators took over. Inoreader is a great one, but comes at a cost, which I will not renew, as it increased a lot over the years. I now have FreshRSS installed on a web site I have, located in London, England. I have over 60 RSS feeds that I check the news summaries about twice a day. FreshRSS is an open-source service written in PHP, running on Apache with a MySQL database. Works like a charm.

If someone wants a demo of the system, I can have something for a future meeting.

JFM

On 2023-08-08 11:59, Dianne Skoll wrote:
WARNING:  This post will contain NSFW language.  Do not read further
if that bothers you. :)

On Tue, 8 Aug 2023 02:17:05 -0400
Michael Goguen <michael [ dot ] goguen [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com> wrote:

[...]

> 2/ could opt in to pay a small fee for 'enhanced' library news
> access, whereby people can select to some extent where they prefer
> some of that fee to go, which media outlets, and maybe track usage,
> maybe especially to help out smaller media with some consistent
> income...

Here's the problem.  Google and Facebook and other tech giants have
conditioned us to receive content "for free" by hiding the *actual* costs, namely: Loss of privacy, massive data collection, and scorched-earth policies to destroy businesses that used to charge for content. You can't compete
with "free".

So now that they've gone and destroyed journalism, Facebook and Google
can do whatever they want.  They have truly fucked us over.

Don't think it will end there.  AI will mean virtually the end of jobs
for actors, writers, animators and other creative jobs. We always assumed
automation would eliminate dull and repetitive jobs, but actually it's
coming for creative jobs. The hardest jobs to automate, ironically, are
the low-end ones like garment work, cooking, etc.

Greed has enshittified the Internet and allowed tech giants to become more powerful than nation-states. Without breaking up tech giants and severely
regulating their actions, we're all royally fucked.

I'm very pessimistic about the future and really glad I'm an older person
no longer working in tech, and not a young person starting out. :(

Well, have a nice day, everyone. :)

Regards,

Dianne.


To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org
To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org
To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org

To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org
To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org
To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org