Wednesday, December 19, 2018

For RSS

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube — did you notice which platforms Russian election-subverters ignored? Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, none of which can be used to put “content” (as it’s called) in front of a captive audience.

Reading the new news about election subversion, watching “The Facebook Dilemma” on Frontline last night, and reading more news this morning about Facebook giving data to Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, &c., I remembered an observation in a post at The Old Reader blog: “There are really only two parties that matter. The writer and the reader.” The Old Reader calls Facebook “the ultimate middle man.”

And from another Old Reader post, a comment from Seth Godin on the virtues of RSS: “It’s an endaround to get past the giant companies that want to dominate your media life. It is snoop free, ad resistant and fast. It can’t be filtered or otherwise squeezed.”

The Old Reader is an RSS reader. Find people whose work you want to follow, add their URLs to a reader, and read.

comments: 2

Pete said...

And Facebook doesn’t even seem to care. People associated with Snopes.com and other fact checkers say Facebook doesn’t take fact checking seriously, and only hired the outside firms as a PR move.

Michael Leddy said...

The scripted answers in the Frontline documentary make clear how PR-driven the effort is — one Facebook person after another saying “We were slow in recognizing,” &c.