Sick to Death of Ads Embedded in Articles: Need RSS Reader Advice

The title of this post says it all (looking at you Apple News! :rage:).

I think I need to move to RSS. I have a few quick questions:

  1. Does RSS eliminate embedded ads in articles?
  2. What reader do you recommend in 2025 for the iPad (I do nearly all of my reading on the iPad)?
  3. What feed service do you recommend for the recommended RSS reader that does not require a subscription?

Thanks in advance for the advice!

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Free. Available for Mac, iPad, iPhone.
Sync feeds via iCloud, Feedly (free), and a few others.

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+1 for NetNewsWire; I only is it on my iPhone to keep up to date with Apple News and I have otherwise drastically reduced my amount of news reading since ditching Twitter.
I like the reader mode in NNW, although this depends on the RSS of the website how much text you get until you have to go to their website ā€¦ :unamused:

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I have used Reeder, NewNewsWire but, I really love Unread.

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NextDNS removes most of those from Apple News & the web in general.

Iā€™ve found RSS to be hit and miss lately with articles not displaying in their entirety (looking at you NY Times). The only solution is to click onto the article in its original format at the source and ads again.

NextDNS Iā€™m telling you. So good at removing so much junk.

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Iā€™ve used both NetNewsWire and Reeder and can recommend both. But I use GoodLinks to eliminate advertisements. I gave up on Apple News a LONG time ago.

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I had the impression that GoodLinks was a ā€œread laterā€ type service or for storing bookmarks. I may be wrong as I never checked it out; Iā€™ve just heard it mentioned many times on podcasts.

Is it an RSS reader?

Does Reeder and NewNewsWire also remove the ads?

Most of my RSS feeds do not include the article, only a headline, occasionally a photo, and a short blub

I read everything in Goodlinks

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Canā€™t speak to NetNewsWire. Reeder does mostly I think, but it depends on the source. But you canā€™t get most Apple News articles into RSS ā€“ they have to be viewed in the Apple News app in my experience.

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I use Little Snitch and activate one of the Ad Blocklists. It is excellent. I never see ads on Apple News and rarely elsewhere.

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In short no. However, in my experience, most sources do not embed ads in their RSS feeds. Therefore, you mostly get ad-free articles. Unfortunately, most ad-driven sites do not publish full articles via RSS; only a summary or truncated first paragraph, which requires you to visit the site to get the full article. Of course, the site is generally full of ads.

As a workaround, some RSS readers give you the option to set per-feed options, including whether to only show the feed or to retrieve the source article and show a reader-view (similar to Safariā€™s reader view). In that case, yes, you can mostly eliminate ads via RSS.

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I have ad blocking on my eero router, but that doesnā€™t help when Iā€™m aware from home. And I occasionally have to turn ad blocking off to get a site to work properly. Thatā€™s why I use an RSS app then clip the articles.

Like it or not, advertising keeps the lights on for many/most news sources, and podcasts. I expect even more of them to go subscription or disappear in the near future.

I like Apple News mainly because I run into articles Iā€™d typically never see. But, I asked ChatGPT to provides RSS links to most of the sources I mostly read in Apple News. It worked great! I had to download separate apps for the WSJ and The Atlantic because I subscribe to those and they are not available via RSS.

I recognize advertising is important to support access to free articles. What I canā€™t stand are multiple intrusive, large ads placed throughout an article. That is obnoxious.

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Yes. And blindingly white advertisements in Apple News.

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Iā€™m still experimenting, but in NetNewsWire, most of the articles (thus farā€”again, Iā€™m just now experimenting) available as full length articles after clicking on the ā€œpageā€ icon.


I use to read the WSJ frequently, as soon as our division VP was finished with it. :grinning:

Iā€™m reviewing it. Am I correct that this is a software, not a hardware, solution?

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GoodLinks looks excellent. It would be great if they would add RSS feeds to it.

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