Follow up: Of the responses I received from last week’s newsletter, no one said that they were leaving Facebook. Most said that they had reviewed and tightened up their privacy settings and one was upset at never having gotten an iTunes coupon.

I think that what this very small sample is saying is that they still get value from being connected to a vast number of other people, including their family, friends and customers. Whether it’s worth the tradeoff for the amount of personal data that we give up is very difficult to know, so we pretty much ignore that side of the bargain.

One area that I would argue that we should not be using Facebook is for news consumption. The black box that is the Facebook algorithm controls the selection of news stories in our feeds and this is almost by definition a bad thing. It’s also unnecessary, when there is an entire internet available to use instead. As Farhod Manjoo noted in his article For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned:

On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

An online alternative for news feeds

With a little bit of effort, it’s possible to get high quality, personalized news online. The tool that I’ve used for many years is known as an RSS Feed Reader. Almost all news sites and blogs have an RSS feed (it stands for Really Simple Syndication) through which their stories are published. There are lots of different applications that can read these feeds, some that are installed on a local computer, others online. They allow you to connect to the RSS feeds of multiple websites and then organize them into an easily readable format.

Since the demise of the late, lamented Google Reader, I have used Feedly as my RSS reader. I have organized about 30 feeds in categories like Business, Culture, Politics and Technology. Each of those feeds provides a complete, unfiltered list of the stories published on that site, in reverse chronological order. I can choose to read or ignore any of them. Most days, I peruse my feeds much as I would a daily newspaper. Marking each feed as “read” leaves them empty to receive the next day’s news.

Feedly does a good job of onboarding new users, providing a quick start to connecting to popular feeds in different subject areas. Adding your own as you find websites and blogs that you want to follow is as simple as plugging in the website URL. The service is free until you reach 100 feeds. An alternative that allows unlimited feeds at no cost is Inoreader. I tried this service out recently and found it to be very capable but in the end I stayed with Feedly, probably because I’m used to it.

I’ll leave the last word again to Farhod Manjoo:

Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today — and every one we will battle tomorrow — is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.

You don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.

Until next week.