Fewer people 'using Facebook for news'

> blocking parents of newborns (I get it, you have a baby and no social contact)

I'm curious how common this is.

When I heavily used Facebook, the demographic most likely to unfriend me is Caucasian mothers of newborns. Presumably because most of my updates were travel/entertainment related and we'd have nothing in common anymore.

> One of the best decisions I've recently made is starting my morning by reading a newspaper back to back.

That's the worst thing you can do.

http://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

That's one of the useless things to do and a terrible waste of time. For major news, the best thing to do, which most newspapers don't want you to do is, compare reporting across newspapers and regions. It's why newspapers forced google, social media, etc to limit news to be region specific. It takes more work to find news from around the world, but you'll see how biased most news are.

Take the recent Trump-Kim meeting. The reporting from korea, singapore, china, russia, europe and the US were so different because all news exist to push an agenda. Of course this applies within the nation as well. The leftist media and foxnews covered the meeting very differently.

Most "news" is just noise. It's nonsense journalists make up to push a narrative. There are only a handful of important news items each week. It's better to focus on those than reading a useless newspaper end to end.

That's something I did in high school because I saw an ad saying it increased you SAT score. What a waste of time. There are far better ways to spend your time than reading nonsense from someone who isn't an expert in anything.

> - my podcast app (probably, at least for now) doesn't know my personal info, friends list, employer, etc.

If you are on Android, the FLOSS app AntennaPod most certainly does none of those things, while still offering solid podcast grabber/player functionality: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

I would dump it entirely if not for keeping up with distant family members and old acquaintances...

When you start following pages of news outlets on Facebook, your feed starts to be filled with news coming from them, making it seem somehow like a RSS reader. At the beginning it even used to somehow work, but in the last few years the content selection algorithms started to be so heavily optimized towards user engagement - likes, comments, reactions, shares - instead of providing interesting content that it became clearly visible, and the difference between a reach of promoted posts and regular one increased massively as well, in turn making Facebook's feed useless as a news provider.

Cutting just news cunsumption out of facebook is not terribly difficult. Why would you lie about it?

Exactly the point! FB is in the advertising business so we can go figure.

Isn’t being forced to consume things the basis of all advertising? I don’t really see how this is a facebook specific problem; all news sites have perverse incentive toward low content page views.