How to Follow Sites You Love without a Social Media Addiction

You, too, can follow this amazing blog without having to bother with social media! A photo of my computer at work on this site at Green Gorilla Cafe in Lausanne, Switzerland. March 20, 2019.

Back in the heyday of the blog era and before the dominance of smartphones and social media, we had more options for following sites we loved, whether blogs or news sites. Tools existed to show you any new posts on any sites you enjoyed.

Also, tools aside, we just proactively followed the sites we enjoyed. We saved our favorite sites in our browsers, often in a categorized folder, and checked in there a few times a week to see if the people running the sites had posted anything new. It didn’t take much mental energy or time—but today’s era of smartphones and social media have made us drones who click on our phones at a moment of pause to see what notifications it has shown us and what information it has pushed us.

We want stuff to just appear on that little rectangular screen, magically.

Alas, as we know all too well these days, social media doesn’t have a lot of mental-health benefits. (Neither do smartphones.)

Given that the Internet itself has some fantastic content in the ether, the fact that some people just assume their social media will naturally bring all that great stuff to them and never bother to investigate other information channels poses a real risk to good or fun or valuable information.

The problem: Social media platforms exist to make money. They make money by showing you advertising and content that keeps you on-line long enough to show you more advertising.

Even if you’ve subscribed to (or liked, or followed, or friended, or fanned) something on a social media platform because you’d like to see what new things that something posts, you likely won’t see it. Social media only shows posts to a fraction of the people who’ve subscribed to (or liked, or followed, or friended, or fanned) any given information feed.

Most people will just shrug and keep doing what they’ve done. (True in most things.) However, how can you follow the great sites—blogs, news, entertainment, sports, other—that you love without a social media addiction?

Fortunately, those of us who want to reduce the social-media mindshare have at least a few options.

RSS Readers

Simple software that grabs content off the sites you’ve saved as ones to follow are called RSS readers. (Read this Wired article for the scoop—and further support for my above points about social media.) Options for RSS readers include Feedly, Flipboard, Old Reader, and Inoreader.

I use Feedly, which has a phone app (for people who want to maintain their smartphone addictions). Other RSS readers, like Flipboard, have phone apps as well.

If you want to follow the Observing Leslie site via an RSS reader, use this URL (just copy and paste—voila!): observingleslie.com/magazine

E-mail Subscriptions

Nearly every website you’ll encounter has a place to sign up for updates. When you subscribe to sites’ e-mail lists, you’ll get updates on new content on the site—and often additional content and freebies that people who don’t subscribe will never see.

I only send an e-mail to my subscriber list about once per month, and I don’t link to all the content on the site when I do. I try to keep it interesting. Yet my monthly e-mail does prompt a lot of people to stop by the website and see all the new content at least once per month—and they get information I don’t post on the main site for nonsubscribers, too.

(Speaking of which… Have you subscribed?)

What other ways of following great sites and on-line information did I miss? Fill me in. How do you stay connected to the sites you love?