Sometimes The Old Ways Are Best

Despite being tempted to set up a companion Facebook account for this site, I’ve never gone through with it – I don’t even have a personal FB account any longer, having happily deleted it a few months ago. At the same time, I’d like to expand the reach of this blog/site without relying on the likes of FB or Twitter.

One of the blogs I read posted something a couple of days ago about using RSS Feed Readers – remember them? Here’s a snippet:

Once upon a time, there was a different way to view content on the web, but then something happened. People were and still are producing content, but the right people weren’t making money from it. In the distant past, people would write stuff, and it would be theirs, and they could choose to monetize it or give it away.

Then Facebook hoovered it up. You could write stuff, and post it on this handy medium that all your friends were subscribed to, and they could splatter ads all around it, and the revenue from those ads would go to…Facebook. Not the people writing it. And Facebook realized that they could be in charge of curating it and organizing it anyway they wanted and splicing in stuff from people you never heard of and learned to dislike (spawning more “interaction”) with more ads and ‘sponsored content’, and you’d read it anyway, trawling through all the trash strewn about to get at the gems you were looking for. And thus was doomscrolling born, and Facebook’s coffers grew ever more swole.

I was a big fan of Google Reader for a long time and then, back in 2013 when they closed it down, I moved over to using Feedly and I still use it every day as a way of checking multiple sites, though this post has prompted me to look at one or two others.

I’ve updated the sidebar over on the right to include an RSS link for my posts. You’ll need to right click and copy it into the feed reader of your choice otherwise you just get a page of messy XML, but it’s a way of seeing the content you want to see without it being filtered, analysed and monetised by goddam Facebook or any of the other social media giants.

So feel free to subscribe to posts via the link on the right or, if you’re a WordPress user, you can follow using the link at the bottom of the page, or even just subscribe via email, again using the link at the bottom of the page. Hell, feel free to share my posts on Facebook with the button at the bottom of each post . . . just don’t expect to see me there.