Truly a disappointing service from Apple. I do like Apple News quite a bit (except for the weirdness about having a "Love" button to rate up a story about a horrible occurrence... "Oh, a church got blown up?...... LOVE (cringe)"). The addition of "some" magazines isn't enough to make it worth $10/month. If NYT and Washington Post were in there, it would be worth it. I feel the interface was seriously dumb, and the inability to subscribe to specific magazines sucked. Also, if I just glanced at a magazine, there it was in my recents list without ability to remove it. And where did the easy "Love/Dislike" buttons go, or the easy ability to mute a source I don't like. It's all in there, but now it's harder to find. Bad move by Apple.
You hit on a real problem there - the rating system is severely lacking, not just on News+ but across a lot of services. Simple thumbs up/down, +/-, love/hate just doesn't add any value. If the person disliked something, was it because of the content, a perceived lack of basis, or simple disregard for the writer or his/her background regardless of the post? Conversely, if they liked it, was that because of stellar investigative reporting, timeliness and thoroughness, or just because it validated the reader's personal beliefs?
I know that for decades people relied on more or less highly educated and experienced people to do things ranging from mundane movie reviews up to highly important political and social analysis. The internet gave people a voice, but it also opened the floodgates for completely inexperienced and anti-social people to offer up their opinion, along with the people responding to that. People are running to and fro, and knowledge is much increased...
Hence the rise of curated services and content. But I see that offering up an extra problem, in that the curation usually has bias or compensation for a foundation instead of the search for truth, eg the Socratic method.
So what is the way out of or around these snares?
The people behind the current service offerings will portray their AI and algorithms as a way to weed out malcontent, but again, that'll be based in bias and compensation. They'll eventually move towards unique ID plus something like fMRI to "make sure" peoples' intent is pure, whatever that means.
Personally, I think the best thing is a very thorough classical education, teaching logic and critical thought. The repair should "begin at home" before anyone gets to a review telling them what to think, or an analyst telling them an interpretation of the facts. (In the latter case, perhaps open-sourcing of raw data for public dissemination - similar to Wikileaks but across a broad spectrum - might be one answer).
YMMV.
