[Announcement] Changes to Newsbot

Hello all,

Last week I asked the community for feedback in regards to the newsbot, whether it's useful, and if it should stay as it is.

I didn't get much feedback, but the little I did get was negative or ambivalent about it.

Thus I've decided to go with my "gut" here and make the following changes:

REMOVE:

• tucson.com feeds in localnews, and localpolitics, and the non-functioning one for localsports.
• tucsonsentinel.com feeds in localnews.

Reason - Tucson.com's feed is very messy, contains many duplicates and "updated" articles (after a gunman is caught, for example), and most of the articles are paywalled anyways.

Additionally, I want to return localnews entirely back to the users. Y'all get to decide what's newsworthy now.

KEEP:

• tucsonsentinel.com feed for localpolitics
• thisistucson feed for home/tucson.social

Reason - Keeping up with local politics, particularly city council stuff, local elections, and other stuff is painfully boring, but incredibly important to keep up with. I think a bot here makes sense.

As for thisistucson - it's not that noisy and is incredibly useful for someone who just wants to know about all the events going on. Much of what this feed posts was getting duplicated in localnews because the links are technically different between the feeds. Removing the localnews feed, should help a LOT with those duplicates.

Feedback

Please provide feedback in this thread if this is still too much bot. Given how many people upvote newsbot articles, it's not clear that the bot is 100% bad for all people. Thus the changes above represent a good-faith attempt to meet somewhere in the middle.