Anyone leave Reddit entirely/completley/for good? - page 3 - ☞ ∙ Life on the Web

I don't actively use Reddit anymore. Sometimes, when I query something in a search engine, a Reddit thread will appear in my search results, and I will look into it to see if it has any relevant information. But otherwise, I don't go out of my way to go onto Reddit. I do not have the Mobile app. I have used the platform for years (since 2005--for 15 years! Wow!) and am sad to see it degrade so low. Reddit used to be a fantastic news aggregator, and was funnier and lighthearted in the gaming communities I used to browse.

Quote from: BlazingCobaltX on March 27, 2024 @947.30

The Reddit API fiasco along with one of Twitter's insane changes was what made me jump into the web revival fully. What worked for me was simply going cold Turkey. r/thenetherlands is still one of the most useful places to get news, so I check it from time to time with one of the Libreddit instances that still work.

There is a real difference in how you interact with Reddit whether you are able to reply or not. Only now I realise that I was always a bit nervous when making a post or comment, because there's a tendency for redditors to come down on you for no reason. This got a bit better when I changed my icon from a girl-like blob to a neutral one (go figure), but ultimately engaging with people on Reddit wasn't fun. Unlike on a forum or chat, you don't really get to know any of the regulars on a subreddit, but you get to deal with the countless of jobless folk that want to get into arguments. Treating Reddit as read-only means you have less room to be outraged at bad takes or be the victim of some argumentative asshole. That inadvertently leads to less interaction with the platform to begin with.

I feel better treating Reddit as a board I read ever so often. My time is spent on better things and I do not deal with daily annoyances. The point about niche communities is fair, though. I miss r/patientgamers a lot, but I remind myself that even in a space where people were largely likable, I didn't make any sort of friends there. It's a big soup of anonymity and most of my contributions have already faded into obscurity. Keeping a website feels far more meaningful instead.

This has largely been my experience as well. While I still use Reddit to check r/minneapolis about once every few weeks, I've largely stopped using it. One recent frustrating change that Reddit has enacted is promoting active confrontation between potentially opposing communities, e.g. if you were on r/childfree you'd suddenly be recommended threads from r/natalist, and so on. It's led to subreddits invading others with aggressive strawman posts that do nothing to foster interesting and enlightening discussion. Overall, the quality of the user posts and replies have gone down, especially since the pandemic, which seems to have turned swathes of people into chronically online opinion-pushers with no concept of civil disagreement nor patient (--nor intelligent.) discussion.

Everyone here has probably seen many examples of the above themselves (ha), but here's the one that broke my camel's back. Tea is in the spoiler for anyone who wants to read.

Spoiler

Recently, a group assault happened in a public area in Downtown Minneapolis, and the Reddit post portrayed the affair as if Downtown's office workers are almost entirely universally bigoted, vicious people. The comments were much the same. No, what happened was that the two travelling victims decided to heckle back the gang of jobless dopeheads who hang outside Sneaky Pete's and the light rail station there. You see, in the middle of the day, most office workers are working, inside their offices (or at home as the case may be), not getting wasted at the local sports bar on their shift. Any office worker who has to move between buildings on their shift will almost always take the Skyways, not the surface streets alongside the light rail, the strip club, sports bar, or giant weed building. (No shade on any of those things, especially the giant weed building. There's just no reason to pass by these storefronts on your shift.)

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It made me realise that a substantial portion of the people using the subreddit don't even live in Minneapolis, or if they do, have their heads stuck up their asses in Powderhorn or Como and have never set foot in Downtown's office core in their lives. In the end, the userbase has ruined Reddit for me, and I highly doubt the general sentiments of the one local subreddit I used to check daily.

Quote from: ctrl-shift-esc on July 18, 2024 @499.98

It really is a trap, because the site is very good at making you feel like it's useful, and I mean sure, it can be in certain cases. But for the most part, it's just not. One of the biggest things that helped me reduce my usage, and I don't know how cringe this is but I don't care : is that I've been bouncing my ideas off of LLM "AI" chatbots, first ChatGPT and now LLaMA, and I realized - wait a minute; I get better and infinitely more polite answers and reactions on a goddamn AI chatbot, and I don't have to wait around the slot machine of whether someone will 1. Answer me in the first place 2. Answer in a way that is actually good. For the most part, 2. rarely happened. And I realized, the level of discourse on Reddit is so low, that I'm better off talking to a literal text prediction algorithm.

[...] I might quit Reddit entirely at some point, but at the moment it serve me a purpose that I'm fine with. It's like a terrible multitool that has one really good screwdriver.

Hahaha! Thank you for writing this, and putting into words what I've been doing without realising! Google is terrible now, and Reddit has deteriorated, but I actually get fairly reasoned, informative answers from Bing--with relevant sources attached in footnotes. Reddit really is a terrible multitool with one really good screwdriver.

Vaguely similar topics! (3)