[password1]

You know that joke that facebook is an over-engineered birthday reminder app? I would make the point that social media are also over-engineerd news feeds.

The vast majority of people get their news from some kind of feed. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, whatever. Scrolling a feed is what gets news to most people. I can see the purpose of making an app that does just that, instead of having to also live with 3000 social features i don't care about (and all the noise and pointless posts they bring to the feed).

I also don't agree on the chronologically ordered list of things i choose to follow. I tried to do that and as soon as you put any kind of news outlet it's going to flood your feed of things you don't care about. I want to follow TechCrunch, Ars Technica or The Verge, but you can be sure that I don't want to see every article they post. I just want to have them on my radar for that more noteworthy stories. And I also want to discover new things, trending articles or topic that might have nothing to do with what i specifically follow.

That's why i also go on HN or reddit for news, because there's some kind of user curation where only the interesting articles ends up on my feed. I get to disover things that i don't already know and follow, plus i get curated news selection that should filter the noise while letting me know what's the hot topic of the week. But if the articles are selected by upvotes, then we have echo-chambers and both this site, reddit or any other social media are prime examples of this. You really get only a narrow and often biased slice. An app whose sole purpose is to give you news and articles you find interesting might have an incentive to do so without trapping you in a filter bubble. Or maybe not, only time will tell.

[rurp]

This approach is fine if it works for you and I'm sure many people want the same, but it's definitely not what I or the GP want. Facebook's hostility to chronological ordering was one of the big reasons I stopped using it way back when and I haven't used news feeds much over the years for the same reason.

I have a collection of bookmarked news sites that I check regularly, which show their articles without any personalized algorithmic reshuffling or hiding. Knowing that I see the same content as other visitors do is a plus for me. I don't need to worry about missing stories I care about because some AI decided the opposite, and I feel like it helps me avoid filter bubbles and clickbait.

This isn't to say that one approach is right or wrong, just that this is what works for me and some other folks.

[skyyler]

I know the dubious security claims turn many off of it, but I really, really, really, really like the way Telegram handles lists of content.

You don't get a big pile of all of your subscriptions in a list, like a twitter feed. You get a list of all of your subscriptions, like a list of IM chats. Selecting one of them gives you a chronological list of posts from that channel.

I think the downside is there seems to be a limit to the number of chats a human can keep track of. Algo feeds let you subscribe to thousands of things without thinking about it too much, that would get overwhelming with how Telegram does things.