Wisdom of crowds has proven very useful in organizing the information overload of the Web.
Sadly though the first wave of social sites like Facebook, X/Twitter or Reddit are increasingly toxic.
How to read news online using social filters and stay sane?
Want to kick Facebook’s ass out of your computer window? Here’s how!
What’s wrong with news on current social media?
The ever popular Facebook rather spreads sensational but fake news from unreliable sources than the boring truth.
Ever since Trump got elected again they even removed fact checking safe-guards that prevented the worst disinformation.
X/Twitter is a social site that had ongoing success as a news filter yet since Musk took over it spiraled downwards.
How that, isn’t X/Twitter still useful for finding the latest news? Sadly not.
For years anger and lowest common denominator posts prevail due to hatebait prone algorithms similar to Facebook’s.
So even though X/Twitter is still widely used for link sharing and spreading news it’s hard to use by now.
Reddit – the site that started as social news – is popular than ever thanks to a front row seat on Google results.
Yet Reddit crowds are often obnoxious, the threads outdated and increasingly full of spam.
Also Reddit is scattered into myriads of niche communities called Subreddits.
So how do you go about reading news nowadays? How can you:
- find news
- sort them
- keep up
- filter out the noise
- stay sane
There is no simple answer for that. I use many ways to locate news that matter.
Web3 to the rescue?
Web3 is the best version of Internet I’ve seen so far. Why?
- It’s decentralized
- anonymous
- and censorship proof.
It runs on Blockchain technology where information gets divided into blocks on different servers so that nobody can control all of it!
On Web3 nobody owns user generated content unlike big tech does on traditional social media.
Yet it’s only theoretically better. In practice the most promising Web3 platforms have not taken off yet.
Networking on Mastodon
Mastodon is like a missing link between Web2 apps like Facebook, X/Twitter or Reddit and not yet widely used Web3 dApps (decentralized apps).
There is no algorithm that decides for you which news to read on Masto!
In contrast highly biased social news sites like Facebook that are often pushing fake news because facts don’t sound spectacular enough.
Mastodon is a less biased social filter for news.
You just have to know how to find the right sources there.
Thing is Masto is not yet popular enough to really serve as a wisdom of crowds tool. The crowds are not big enough yet.
I follow some of my favorite sources there and some of the people I trust to share what matters.
No algorithm prevents me from seeing their updates!
Masto by itself is not enough though!
Following feeds on Feedly
One solution I use is still working. Subscribing to or rather following feeds.
This way you just follow the sources of Signal instead of the noise.
I use Feedly for over a decade. There is no social filter there though.
The only filter is that you can look up which publications are popular by the number of their followers.
I knew most of them upfront so I know who to trust yet for new users it may be challenging to sort news sources based solely on following.
LinkedIn sharing
LinkedIn is a social network initially made for jobs and work.
Most people there use real names and act in a civil manner.
Why? They don’t want to lose job opportunities by lashing out etc.
Thus also the quality of the news is relatively high.
Plus people stay on topic and don’t force their politics too much on you.
I use LinkedIn for work by simply following a few trusted users I know for years.