As someone who runs a business partly driven by people who use Facebook as a crappy replacement for RSS, I can confirm. Facebook made a change a while back where people who explicitly followed my page to keep up to date on local events and businesses suddenly were not seeing anything I posted. I had to start paying Facebook to keep them showing things to people, but even that is far slower than it had been. Out of about 2000 people following my page, I used to have around 1500 seeing my posts per week, now it's down to under 500.

My readers are pretty upset, complaining to me that I don't post enough anymore and they're missing events they wanted to know about, but I can't make Facebook show them what Facebook doesn't want to show them. I tell the people to go directly to my website, but for a lot of them Facebook is the only website that exists.

It's a small town without a newspaper or any other media outlets, so I'm still trying to figure out how to keep on going because I think it's a worthwhile service. Facebook doesn't make it easy anymore though.

I was one of those people.

It's... shocking, how much of that noise that you can get by without.

To be fair, I'm missing out on a ton of news with regards to the community and culture that I used Facebook to participate in - but my life is measurably better in every other metric for having left the platform. Getting BMX racing news second-hand is a small price to pay for having my mind back.

(Disclaimer: I spent 20+ hours per week on Facebook. It's mostly nice to have those 20+ hours back, and not having to be constantly bombarded by all the evil of this world is a huge plus, too.)

I can't be smug though. HN has become my replacement for RSS. Surely even Facebook is a better approximation.