Joshua Emmons replied to Brent Simmons’ No Algorithms post with a couple of very good tweets, which Brent quoted back on his blog. They summarize well what people have been saying about centralized, algorithm-driven social media for a while now.

When you read Facebook or Twitter everything that “bubbles up” to you are things that “register” on the algorithm’s requirements list: sometimes it’s funny or important things, but most of the time it’s just outrageous and/or outraged posts. This near constant flow of high emotion content takes its toll on people after a while if you don’t carefully trim the people you follow… but even then, if the platform decides to show you updates from people you don’t follow, or reorder those updates based on some obscure criteria, that’s not going to change much.

Compare that to getting your news and entertainment from RSS feeds, where you not only control your sources (the people/organizations you “follow”), but also control the platform (the way those updates are sorted, filtered, and displayed). If you don’t like one platform, you can always change to another one. You’re in control and, ultimately, that keeps you more sane.