Many news apps and social-media platforms tend to feed their users content that is fun and shareable, but lacking a bit in substance. A bottomless-breadsticks approach to curation, more or less.

While they’re easy to digest, they probably won’t make you smarter. Flipboard can, and does.

Flipboard is a platform that allows users to discover content across thousands of interests: they’re as broad as “sports” or “recipes,” and as specific as “Middle East News for the Perplexed” or “European Family Holidays.”

But unlike social media, the user gets to control their experience, by building “magazines” that compile content from a variety of sources and creators.

To get started, simply sign up for a free account from your desktop or mobile device (there’s also a mobile app). Flipboard will walk you through an introductory tutorial to help you identify your interests. From there, it relies on familiar tools to help optimize your experience: “like” and “show less” buttons, discovery tools and also the input of a crack in-house editorial team.

It all adds up to storytelling that will inform and challenge you … rather than, you know, breadsticks.