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My Day Away from Reddit

unsupervision.com

71–77 of 77 posts

Re: My Day Away from Reddit

#71
post #31

I quit visiting Reddit daily 6-7 years ago. The reason is very simple: I asked myself what value Reddit provides in my life. What will I remember from yesterday's browsing? Or last week. Or last month. Am I really going to miss out on anything? I made the same exercise with several online newspapers. If I can't remember what I read yesterday, whatever I read was probably a waste of time. I stopped reading at least 3…

It’s so hard, life is full of boring moments.

Re: My Day Away from Reddit

#72
post #3

It did highlight to me how often I circle back to Reddit almost subconsciously when idling surfing the internet. Will need to do something about that…

I uninstalled Apollo yesterday and I’m kind of embarrassed at how many times since I’ve tried to open it without even thinking about it. It’s only when the app isn’t there that your brain snaps out of it and you wonder what the hell you’re doing.

I haven't uninstalled, but I had to hide my Sync icon in a folder I open rarely, to keep from clicking it out of habit.

Staying away from Reddit hasn't been too hard but it gets new stuff faster than the newspapers or other media sites I regularly go to. This forces me to slow down and read the other sites' articles more thoroughly which is probably good.

Re: My Day Away from Reddit

#73
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is it. Clean up your life. What you do in your 20s is not the same as 30s or 40s, etc. That might speak to the people you interact with as well. I was "searching" for something on reddit and other places like it. Spending time with friends, getting married, having kids, it changes all of that. Real people interaction pulls you away from the place where so much idle time is spent. There is no time for reddit when…

>> There is no time for reddit when you're living your real life Except if you're drunk and lonely, and all the bars are closed. Then it's a real problem. The real nasty thing is, so many people are living in a world now where they act like there's nothing better to do on the train, when there are people all around us we should be paying attention to and interacting with.

Will Reddit help or does it only provide a distraction from misery?

Re: My Day Away from Reddit

#74
post #46
post #31

I quit visiting Reddit daily 6-7 years ago. The reason is very simple: I asked myself what value Reddit provides in my life. What will I remember from yesterday's browsing? Or last week. Or last month. Am I really going to miss out on anything? I made the same exercise with several online newspapers. If I can't remember what I read yesterday, whatever I read was probably a waste of time. I stopped reading at least 3…

I don‘t remember most of the things I‘ve read on reddit but I definitely remember the games, books, music and shows I discovered through reddit. Or that it helped me to keep up to date when covid appeared. Or how I kept up with the developments in the Ukraine last year. While lots of reddit browsing is time wasting, it also enabled a lot of discovery for me that I didn‘t get elsewhere so far.

And you could not have found out about these things any other way than through Reddit?

Re: My Day Away from Reddit

#75
post #45
post #31

I quit visiting Reddit daily 6-7 years ago. The reason is very simple: I asked myself what value Reddit provides in my life. What will I remember from yesterday's browsing? Or last week. Or last month. Am I really going to miss out on anything? I made the same exercise with several online newspapers. If I can't remember what I read yesterday, whatever I read was probably a waste of time. I stopped reading at least 3…

Did you apply the same question to your TV viewing? What about movies? Video games? Reddit is entertainment. Do you enjoy reading it? Then it's enriched you about as much as those other activities.

Yes. I quit mindlessly watching TV long before I stopped using Reddit or reading low quality newspapers. Probably around 15 years ago? Streaming services became usable here (in Norway) a few years later and they lead to me (well, me and my wife) spending even less time watching TV. Things became a bit more structured. We usually watch the news at 1900 on the public broadcaster here in Norway (NRK), and then perhaps a movie, a documentary or a couple of episodes of some TV series.

About 3-4 days out of the week we only watch the news broadcast, and then spend time downstairs in our hobby spaces. I build electronics, 3D print stuff, program etc, and my wife does various textile projects. Some days we spend a good 4-5 hours just making stuff. Or we go for bike rides.

In fact, the only reason we still have basic TV service is because my wife likes to watch baking and sewing shows live (as they air for the first time). (Can't remember the name of these shows ... "Great British Bake-off"?). About once or twice per year I try watching movies on regular cable TV (well, IP based "cable") and I find the experience really annoying with all the commercial breaks.

Spending less time just mindlessly scrolling through reddit or low quality "news" sources also means I have more time to read books. I don't think I've read this many books per year since I was in my 20s.

I find the things that I've replaced Reddit (and other things) with far more enriching and fun. I regret not being more selective about what I spend my time on in the past. I've wasted a lot of time on things I didn't enjoy all that much.

Re: My Day Away from Reddit

#76
post #41
post #31

I quit visiting Reddit daily 6-7 years ago. The reason is very simple: I asked myself what value Reddit provides in my life. What will I remember from yesterday's browsing? Or last week. Or last month. Am I really going to miss out on anything? I made the same exercise with several online newspapers. If I can't remember what I read yesterday, whatever I read was probably a waste of time. I stopped reading at least 3…

If you can't remember what you read yesterday on the newspaper the problem might not lie with the newspaper.

Well, isn't it perhaps a bit of a chicken and egg problem? What came first? The bad habit of skimming a lot of low quality nonsense news or the fact that it meant so little to you that you can't really remember what you read later?

When I look at the traffic even from Hacker News you can kind of tell that most people who click on links even here, just spend a few seconds looking at your content and then disengage. Especially if you don't provide people with lots of pictures and "hooks" that allow people to engage more in some way. Give people a wall of text and they'll barely skim what you write.

Re: My Day Away from Reddit

#77
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're visiting r/funny and r/memes 99% of the time sure. But it also has great hobbyist communities. r/functionalprint and r/fixmyprint are amazing for 3d printer enthusiasts, for example. It's a bit like criticizing the library for stocking copies of MAD magazines.

I agree with everything except the last sentence. Reddit does want to push you towards the use of /r/all (or similar) because that's they get more time in front of your eyeballs. The design of the product is pushing you towards that view of everything, so that you end up doing the endless-scrolling thing. I'm interested by the direction Lemmy (or a similar system) might take. At the moment it's a Reddit-lite clone, w…

This is true, but it's their job to get a balance between guiding new users towards building routine and getting post-onboard users to the content that is more engaging for their personal preferences. They have to have _something_ on the frontpage and the reality is that the subs that serve the most shallow content are the ones that will drive early repeat engagement.

What they've been missing for an age is an equivalent to Twitter's retweets. Retweets deliver you straight to the door of content providers via the people you already follow. You can start with Brian Cox and NDT as signup recommends, and make your way to your preferred scientific niches pretty quickly.

Reddit has crossposts that barely scratch the surface and often make the source sub almost invisible.

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