Before facebook was born, users had client-side tools to help filter, sort, & highlight things that were important to them. NNTP, Mail, & RSS clients would con

Before facebook was born, users had client-side tools to help filter, sort, & highlight things that were important to them. NNTP, Mail, & RSS clients would consume volumes of data, sort through thousands of posts or articles, and users could focus and prioritize on what they knew to themselves what was important. Facebook strips users of those tools, and the only choice users have is to trust their algorithm to do it for them, and do it in the user's interest. They actively work against users trying to pull data from facebook's feed into their own clients not only by making it a ToS violation, but by scrambling the html layout of the page that renders it, making it extremely difficult to parse. And also using newspeak-esque language like "We are trying to protect you by doing this", suggesting that you're doing something bad by consuming your data. I think it's becoming painfully clear these social networks have an increasingly twisted view of what they feel is the user's interest.