This is a useless feature that deviates from the core reason I use Plex, please allow me to turn it off.
@mdnitoil said:
Since I’m not being charged for it, I’m missing the “money Grab” that’s occurring.
At least a piece of it is “shared ad revenue.” Another piece is that the content owners are most probably paying Plex for placement in this feature but I guess that could be included in the first statement.
@OttoKerner is the fact that it’s front and center taking priority over my own media and mediaserver also one of the wrinkles that you’re ironing out?
Come on, Plex is (used to be) a private media server for playing local media. Why does US based news takes precedence over that for me now without being able to turn it off or move it to the bottom of the list.
It’s the most important item in the list now and it’s useless for me and outside the US. Why is it there prominently?
@mdnitoil said:
Since I’m not being charged for it, I’m missing the “money Grab” that’s occurring.
Plex seems to be out of the business of making money directly from their users in the traditional sense, i.e., we pay Plex for a product/service that we value, and that’s the end of the relationship. The content provided here is not free content, and Plex sure as hell didn’t acquire Watchup for millions of dollars to give us a feature that nobody asked for. Plex is very clearly moving in the direction of becoming a content distributor where the content providers and advertisers become the customers, and our eyes/usage data become the product.
Read between the lines (really just read the lines themselves) for a second and tell me this doesn’t remind you of Facebook’s approach to providing targeted content to users in exchange for the sale of their data and a ton of the ad revenue…
@plex said:
And because Plex is all about your media your way, you can personalize your news feed, and our advanced AI learns what you like and gets smarter the more you watch.
[ … ]
Starting with our recent acquisition of Watchup, we’ve worked hard to partner with the most reputable and trustworthy news sources around the world to bring you coverage from a wide variety of viewpoints.
[ … ]
This feature is ad-supported which means that it comes at no additional cost to you, allowing everyone to enjoy high quality news content.
This move is not at all unrelated to the attempted privacy policy changes that were revised last month after the great revolt; I should say that I am not at all inclined to wear a tinfoil hat, and I don’t soil the bed over my data being sold in exchange for the utilization of a service. For me, the frustration is more about the direction of the product following the money when a number of core features are still lacking. It’s much less about any sacrosanct notion of personal privacy or “free as in freedom.”
Plex, why is it so hard to implement these new “features” and giving your customers the option to not use them?
Between the privacy policy (which, @fecaleagle, wasn’t reversed, just revised - they still collect info and you can’t opt out of it), this new thing, and the lack of focus on fixing issues of their core features (like viewing your photos or playing your music and videos), it is really hard to make the case to stay with you. I really hope things change because I want to remain a Plex customer.
Good luck to us Plex users.
Thanks, edited.
I haven’t gotten the update yet but I better be able to f’ing remove the News library or I’m ditching my Plex sub and moving elsewhere!
will the Plex News agent support fakeNews as a meta tag?
In all seriousness, we…we got this before we got live TV on the Roku?
Dammit Plex, I’m tired of coding.
Another who really wants to be able to turn this off. I didn’t get too flustered about the privacy thing, but this is really annoying.
Hmm jet another, useless feature comes out, before the 1 year old bug, sync. Music stopping on android devices. Had enough, moving on to emby. Disappointed life time user. Should saved my money.
Let me turn it off or I will turn off my plexpasses - once and for all. Easy as is. This is ridiculous.
Useless feature. Rather than ranting please upvote my feature request to disable it from the dashboard.
The more votes (click the “like” option) a feature reqest has, the more Plex takes notice. That said, I doubt they will pay any attention since they seems to have completely lost the plot these days but at least they will see how many peaople do not want “News”
Link to Feature Reqest: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/289169/feature-request-disable-news-from-the-dashboard/p1?new=1
@wheatism said:
Useless feature. Rather than ranting please upvote my feature request to disable it from the dashboard.The more votes (click the “like” option) a feature reqest has, the more Plex takes notice. That said, I doubt they will pay any attention since they seems to have completely lost the plot these days but at least they will see how many peaople do not want “News”
Link to Feature Reqest: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/289169/feature-request-disable-news/p1?new=1
Maybe BUT Plex has a history of ignoring feature requests if they don’t like them or they do not fit in Plex’s grand plan to get rich(er).
I quit bothering with feature requests long before I quit supporting Plex.
Yeah, I’m now looking into alternatives, Emby was a new find for me recently and may be the way forward. So sad that Plex has lost its direction
@Elijah_Baley said:
Plex has lost their moral center and are now nothing more than money grubbing con men.
And you are now nothing more than a “like” grubbing whiner, as evidenced by your obsessiveness to keep repeating yourself at every chance you get.
Whatever purpose you once had on this forum, it is clearly gone, so please leave for emby already. It’s getting really pathetic. And frankly, a bit annoying too.
@d2freak said:
@Elijah_Baley said:
Plex has lost their moral center and are now nothing more than money grubbing con men.And you are now nothing more than a “like” grubbing whiner, as evidenced by your obsessiveness to keep repeating yourself at every chance you get.
Whatever purpose you once had on this forum, it is clearly gone, so please leave for emby already. It’s getting really pathetic. And frankly, a bit annoying too.
I don’t much care what you, or anyone thinks. I have my beliefs and you have yours but I believe that reasonably polite discourse, even those diametrically opposed, is a good thing.
Also I am quite upset at Plex just now and I intend to vent until I have exhausted my venting load or I get banned.
I really do not much care what happens now.
As I said in another post I have been looking for a reason to thing I am making a mistake in moving to Emby but the pathetic excuse making I have seen from some Plex supporters and the deafening silence from Plex just serves to reenforce that my decision is correct for me.
BTW: Yours is not the first personal attack that I have seen and I am sure it will not be the last but it rare to see one whit so little substance.
I am currently using the Google newsfeeds on a daily basis.
Just received the “news” on my smart phone and I had to search for that feature. 
So it is not springing into my face. I need to open the sliding menu and click it. No direct dashboard integration. Good so far.
I agree that there should be an option in the Android app’s option to not show the news menu if you do not need it. But I am not fighting over it.
But I am not US based and I don’t care about A SINGLE NEWS item that popped up in my news feed. I have configured a language on my PMS, I load the Plex app from a non-English app store, my smart phone has language settings… so what kind of AI offers English news feeds with US content to me?
I understand that this is where you start from, but ATM I don’t care about this feature.
And with Google, I simply swipe a news item into its digital nirvana if I do not care. I was not able to do that with any of the news feeds.
I will not take a second look into that menu since it has nothing of interest for me and is not eas to use.
Do you think that I will look at a video feed in a non native language with news from the other side of the globe? How would your AI judge what kind of news I am interested in?
Directly jumping from video news to next video news is Youtube style … and this feature is what I do hate most about Youtube. I want to look at a certain video clip. You have an Autoplay option for my libraries. Please respect that setting for news items also.
I will not run away from Plex, but I am not expecting any real value for non-US customers soon, so I will probably simply forget about this feature.
I do not want this news and i for sure do not ant it on my dashboard (and even more you put it above “Home” clearly doing an aggressive push for this totally ridiculous feature which gives to me extreme biased news (i have my news which is two thre eplugins in my channels, exactly where news belongs) are you PLEX now cherry-picking the news and telling me what news i should listen to ? Are you now the guarantors of correct news ? Ridiculous.
Give us an option to remove this clutter from our dashboard.
@rossinior said:
Just received the “news” on my smart phone and I had to search for that feature.So it is not springing into my face. I need to open the sliding menu and click it. No direct dashboard integration. Good so far.
Mine is pretty much right at the top:
What I REALLY hate though is how it starts to play - WITH SOUND - as soon as you click it. My spouse was still snoring away early this morning when I spotted the new news button. I woke up the whole household when it suddenly started blaring some stupid US news channel.
I’ll be more careful what I click on from now on, but I really hope Plex will reconsider shoving this down our throats like that… hide it in “Channels” or something.
