Fewer people 'using Facebook for news'(bbc.com)
bbc.com
Fewer people 'using Facebook for news'
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44457167
23 comments
I unliked all the publications I was following in favour of an RSS reader and I couldn't be happier. Between that and blocking parents of newborns (I get it, you have a baby and no social contact), Facebook has been reduced to inspirational text on colourful backgrounds. I'll keep it for universal login, groups and messaging, but I'm done with the news feed.
> blocking parents of newborns (I get it, you have a baby and no social contact)
I'm curious how common this is.
When I heavily used Facebook, the demographic most likely to unfriend me is Caucasian mothers of newborns. Presumably because most of my updates were travel/entertainment related and we'd have nothing in common anymore.
I'm curious how common this is.
When I heavily used Facebook, the demographic most likely to unfriend me is Caucasian mothers of newborns. Presumably because most of my updates were travel/entertainment related and we'd have nothing in common anymore.
I think there is a difference between unfriending and unfollowing. By blocking I meant unfollow, but we are still online friends.
One of the best decisions I've recently made is starting my morning by reading a newspaper back to back. The stories I would never click on are usually the most fascinating.
> One of the best decisions I've recently made is starting my morning by reading a newspaper back to back.
That's the worst thing you can do.
http://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
That's one of the useless things to do and a terrible waste of time. For major news, the best thing to do, which most newspapers don't want you to do is, compare reporting across newspapers and regions. It's why newspapers forced google, social media, etc to limit news to be region specific. It takes more work to find news from around the world, but you'll see how biased most news are.
Take the recent Trump-Kim meeting. The reporting from korea, singapore, china, russia, europe and the US were so different because all news exist to push an agenda. Of course this applies within the nation as well. The leftist media and foxnews covered the meeting very differently.
Most "news" is just noise. It's nonsense journalists make up to push a narrative. There are only a handful of important news items each week. It's better to focus on those than reading a useless newspaper end to end.
That's something I did in high school because I saw an ad saying it increased you SAT score. What a waste of time. There are far better ways to spend your time than reading nonsense from someone who isn't an expert in anything.
That's the worst thing you can do.
http://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
That's one of the useless things to do and a terrible waste of time. For major news, the best thing to do, which most newspapers don't want you to do is, compare reporting across newspapers and regions. It's why newspapers forced google, social media, etc to limit news to be region specific. It takes more work to find news from around the world, but you'll see how biased most news are.
Take the recent Trump-Kim meeting. The reporting from korea, singapore, china, russia, europe and the US were so different because all news exist to push an agenda. Of course this applies within the nation as well. The leftist media and foxnews covered the meeting very differently.
Most "news" is just noise. It's nonsense journalists make up to push a narrative. There are only a handful of important news items each week. It's better to focus on those than reading a useless newspaper end to end.
That's something I did in high school because I saw an ad saying it increased you SAT score. What a waste of time. There are far better ways to spend your time than reading nonsense from someone who isn't an expert in anything.
These days, the best source for my news is a handful of high-quality news, current events, interview, and talk podcasts. Big upsides include:
- being able to listen at faster than 1x speed
- show notes for further investigation
- facts and opinions from a variety of perspectives
- custom amounts of information versus entertainment that I can tweak based on my mood and available attention
- barely any ads... sometimes none
- it's RSS feeds under the hood, so I can easily go back and find things I want to share again, and I can defer certain content without it scrolling off into the facebook void
- my podcast app (probably, at least for now) doesn't know my personal info, friends list, employer, etc.
- being able to listen at faster than 1x speed
- show notes for further investigation
- facts and opinions from a variety of perspectives
- custom amounts of information versus entertainment that I can tweak based on my mood and available attention
- barely any ads... sometimes none
- it's RSS feeds under the hood, so I can easily go back and find things I want to share again, and I can defer certain content without it scrolling off into the facebook void
- my podcast app (probably, at least for now) doesn't know my personal info, friends list, employer, etc.
> - my podcast app (probably, at least for now) doesn't know my personal info, friends list, employer, etc.
If you are on Android, the FLOSS app AntennaPod most certainly does none of those things, while still offering solid podcast grabber/player functionality: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/
If you are on Android, the FLOSS app AntennaPod most certainly does none of those things, while still offering solid podcast grabber/player functionality: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/
To me this sounds the same like if you said: Fewer people use pharmacy to buy firefigthing equipment....
What kind of news could you get from facebook? They are not mews outlet... and hiw does it help to switch to whatsapp, snapchat and instagram to get news????
What kind of news could you get from facebook? They are not mews outlet... and hiw does it help to switch to whatsapp, snapchat and instagram to get news????
When you start following pages of news outlets on Facebook, your feed starts to be filled with news coming from them, making it seem somehow like a RSS reader. At the beginning it even used to somehow work, but in the last few years the content selection algorithms started to be so heavily optimized towards user engagement - likes, comments, reactions, shares - instead of providing interesting content that it became clearly visible, and the difference between a reach of promoted posts and regular one increased massively as well, in turn making Facebook's feed useless as a news provider.
I find it truly horrifying that we got to a place where it's a real step forward that fewer people are using Facebook for news.
Didn't Facebook say they were deliberately unprioritizing news article in favor of posts written by friends?
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I systematically blocked all posts from news sites after the Trump election; I don't need to hear about the same outrages a dozen times over every day. Facebook got a lot less stressful - the amount of actual content posted by my friends about their own lives turns out to be fairly minimal, too, so I can catch up on Facebook in 10-15 minutes and then simply get on with everything else.