Every day, when I wake up but still don’t have enough energy to get up, I read the latest news. I don’t use Google News or Microsoft MSN News Start (or whatever they’ll rebrand the same service next month), but, as if I still was living in 2008, I use an RSS reader.
So the news aren’t chosen by an algorithm, but are sourced from carefully hand-picked feeds, slowly found and evaluated over a decade.
One of those sources is TechCrunch, which used to be a bit more interesting, now has become a bit of a clone of Engadget (it’s run by the same publisher) but with more focus on acquisitions and startups. I’ve always thought about just removing it, but I’ve always felt a bit nostalgic because it’s been with me for over a decade.
In the last few days, however, I noticed a radical change. Content was sloppily copied from 9to5mac using ifttt, headlines had errors: at first I ignore the problem and quickly swipe away the news, then I start to be severely annoyed!
I click on one of these NOT interesting news and I find myself on an amateur blogspot site. Huh? What happened?
Quite simply, TechCrunch was using feedburner to distribute their feed so they could easily redirect all subscribers to another site if there were any changes. Here it is (was?) : http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch
Maybe they decided that by now no one uses RSS anymore, and so, they deleted their feedburner account, allowing a cybersquatter to take it?
The new feed is present at https://techcrunch.com/feed/ but it seems weird not to have used the redirect function and allow a potential scammer to grab the old feedburner address and get all views from all the old RSS subscribers… (We are dozens!!! We’re not gone!)