And I say that as someone with a very low bar for when time is well spent. Like John Lennon, I believe that time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted. Reddit wasn’t clearing that bar for me. It felt like a slot machine. There was some compulsion to pull the handle again but ultimately I walked away less happy.
(Slot machine mechanics are, unfortunately, present to a degree in every discussion board, group chat and mailing list - other people posting potentially interesting content == variable-schedule reward, which is the way to get addicted fast.)
Reddit has been on a downward slide for quite some time, and the quality of discussions there has been getting consistently worse.
Many of the subs that used to bring me joy have been overtaken by the toxic sludge that you’ll find on other social media. There are still some pockets of goodness left, but it increasingly requires deliberate work to unsubscribe, apply keyword filters, etc. It has become increasingly difficult to justify my time spent there.
None of this has to do with the UI or apps, and I had already decided to trial some time away from Reddit because I could feel it pulling me in daily, and increasingly I’d find that my time there was not well spent, and often made me feel angry after I’d encounter the same bullshit again and again.
So this latest mess is not even the primary reason I’m leaving. It’s just a very very strong push over an edge I was already teetering over.
I know many people who are in the same boat, and I’d argue that this is Reddit’s future. The latest actions are like a poison pill. They won’t kill the site overnight, but more and more people will feel poorly about using the site and implicitly supporting Spez’s bullshit.
Reddit will survive like Twitter is surviving. It exists, but people don’t want to be there anymore, and the kinds of people who made it a compelling place to spend time are the kinds of users who are leaving in droves.
I envision my future Reddit use looking more like my current google use. Something that will happen in an incognito window while searching for something specific. I don’t see myself continuing to spend time contributing.
If the information located within had been posted on discord, it would have been lost. Forums with their own file hosting are often the last documentation we have of something, as file hosters die off.
Ever noticed how google will say 600k results but only show you 1.5 pages? The mass knowledge of the internet is being lost.
Sure things were different 2005, but for the last 5-10 years it's been pretty clear what direction reddit has been headed in. So, I can't agree more that past behavior predicts future behavior.
Reddit's been like this for a long, long time.
There are a bunch of forums online which will gladly accept an influx of refugees from reddit, and the world will move on. If there isn’t one, one will form, somewhere.
However, past behaviour also predicts future behaviour. The current actions of board of directors (and the silence of others) speaks volumes.
Reddit may go as far as salting the earth for communities that do end up successfully migrating. I wouldn’t put it past them to hire a troll farm to spam a niche community with low-quality content.
It’s been a nice break away from Reddit.