4 ms·

Fewer people 'using Facebook for news'

31 points by mikece 8y ago

ppeetteerr 8y ago
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.
- bmarquez 8y ago
  > 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.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    I think there is a difference between unfriending and unfollowing. By blocking I meant unfollow, but we are still online friends.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wyldfire 8y ago
Self-reported, meaning fewer people "willing to confess that they use Facebook for news."
- drb91 8y ago
  Cutting just news cunsumption out of facebook is not terribly difficult. Why would you lie about it?
seba_dos1 8y ago
Facebook is completely unusable for news, optimizing for what will make you "engage" instead of what's really interesting. Some time ago I went back to an RSS reader, which massively reduced my frustration.
- vixen99 8y ago
  Exactly the point! FB is in the advertising business so we can go figure.
Horseshoe 8y ago
People use Facebook for news? I mostly use it to find out the special flavor of the day at my local ice cream stand.
- Deinos 8y ago
  I would dump it entirely if not for keeping up with distant family members and old acquaintances...
humanrebar 8y ago
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.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > - 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/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
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.
- paidleaf 8y ago
  > 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/ http://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/ https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli 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.
mirko22 8y ago
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????
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  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.
Zentgraf1 8y ago
Lol only genetic waste uses Facebook anyways
ytch 8y ago
Reading news on a website that you cannot choose what you want to read? It is a stupid idea.
- drb91 8y ago
  Isn’t being forced to consume things the basis of all advertising? I don’t really see how this is a facebook specific problem; all news sites have perverse incentive toward low content page views.
rtchau 8y ago
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.
em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
Didn't Facebook say they were deliberately unprioritizing news article in favor of posts written by friends?
marssaxman 8y ago
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.
JohnClark1337 8y ago
Well, I mean, the older generations are dying off...

31 points by mikece 8y ago

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.

bmarquez 8y ago
> 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.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  I think there is a difference between unfriending and unfollowing. By blocking I meant unfollow, but we are still online friends.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

wyldfire 8y ago

Self-reported, meaning fewer people "willing to confess that they use Facebook for news."

drb91 8y ago
Cutting just news cunsumption out of facebook is not terribly difficult. Why would you lie about it?

seba_dos1 8y ago

Facebook is completely unusable for news, optimizing for what will make you "engage" instead of what's really interesting. Some time ago I went back to an RSS reader, which massively reduced my frustration.

vixen99 8y ago
Exactly the point! FB is in the advertising business so we can go figure.

Horseshoe 8y ago

People use Facebook for news? I mostly use it to find out the special flavor of the day at my local ice cream stand.

Deinos 8y ago
I would dump it entirely if not for keeping up with distant family members and old acquaintances...

humanrebar 8y ago

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.

craftyguy 8y ago
> - 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/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

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.

paidleaf 8y ago
> 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/ http://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/ https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli 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.

mirko22 8y ago

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????

seba_dos1 8y ago
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.

Zentgraf1 8y ago

Lol only genetic waste uses Facebook anyways

ytch 8y ago

Reading news on a website that you cannot choose what you want to read? It is a stupid idea.

drb91 8y ago
Isn’t being forced to consume things the basis of all advertising? I don’t really see how this is a facebook specific problem; all news sites have perverse incentive toward low content page views.

rtchau 8y ago

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.

em3rgent0rdr 8y ago

Didn't Facebook say they were deliberately unprioritizing news article in favor of posts written by friends?

marssaxman 8y ago

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.

JohnClark1337 8y ago

Well, I mean, the older generations are dying off...