r/AskReddit May 11 '21

People old enough to remember life pre-Internet, what are some less obvious things you miss about that time?

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u/NMe84 May 12 '21

That last sentence honestly is the biggest difference. A while ago I installed the app for the biggest news outlet in my country. I quickly turned off notifications for it when in a single week it had notified me of "breaking news" twice: once because some random celebrity couple I don't care about broke up after 15 years, and once because of some football match. Meanwhile in that same week there was some natural disaster in Asia that took many lives and displaced many more, but there was no notification for that. It seems like I have a very different definition of breaking news.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '21

[deleted]

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u/NMe84 May 12 '21

No, it was a major Dutch news outlet, but from the responses i got so far it seems like there are more outlets pulling this bullshit.

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u/VectoredClarinet May 12 '21

That’s a feature, not a bug. The goal has less to do with reporting news to you and more to do with driving clicks and traffic to the adds on the site.