About 6 months ago I made the decision to stop browsing r/All and only go to specific Reddit communities that match my interest. The protest has been a excellent opportunity to just completely cut Reddit out of my life.

I don't miss it, which is good and slightly sad considering the time I spent there. Maybe it's a sign I should give some more critical consideration of what I spend my time on.

I realized a while back I basically used it as a fidget toy: open it, scroll, realize I’m not reading anything, close it.

Breaking that passive hand habit has been the hardest part but my use will drop to 1% of what it was. I’m not going to quit completely because I don’t use other social media and sometimes I have questions related to a specific thing that I’m not sure where else to ask, but those instances are quite rare.

I was probably worse: open it, scroll, open link and briefly read it, spend 10 minutes scrolling through the comments until I see something that makes me angry/sad/depressed, repeat. Now that I've stopped using it I'll just open up 2048 or Cribbage if I need a quick distraction, otherwise I start reading from a novel.

I have been looking for appropriate replacements to it but I haven't managed yet. Niche internet forums were my favorite place on the web when I was a kid and they were infinitely better than modern social media, but pretty much all of them are gone nowadays...

What was that one that had something about “church of the screaming electron.” Wish I could remember the name.

Many are clamoring for a Reddit killer. Maybe just need a Reddit model killer. Return to multiple forums, smaller and more specialized.

Maybe part of the reason why people are increasingly at each other’s throats is because, online, everyone is subjected to everyone’s opinions. This leads to “Nancy “seeing “Bob” write an opinion about sexuality/religion/politics which infuriates her and she sends off a tweet storm to avenge herself, directing attacks onto Bob and his like. “charlene” sees her compatriot being attacked and launches a tweet storm at Nancy and all her followers which then “Charlie” sees and can’t believe the level of stupidity and hate and intolerance in the world so he sets out to make it right… by launching a tweet storm which then is seen by etc etc.

Also, I think they’re used to an idea that the internet was like Las Vegas. What happens there stays there. Not so, now you have a bunch of angry people slinging electrons at each other, many of the just absolutely floored at how stupid and hateful other people are, their eyes are opened, they go into work or their family function with this knowledge and launch a tweet storm, or a brick, but in the “real world.”

Like squabbling children or hen pecking, a little is necessary but sometimes you have to separate them before they destroy each.

> What was that one that had something about “church of the screaming electron.”

Temple of The Screaming Electron

(In original BBS incarnation, “& the Temple of the Screaming Electron”, only looking it up because of your comment did I find out that the BBS I spent a while with outlived the BBS era as an internet forum.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOTSE

Thanks, yep TOTSE… that’s it! A lot seedier than I remembered, side bars pretty much say it all.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070710135400/http://www.totse....

A Reddit killer would run into the same problems as Reddit.

Greedy fucks who just want to make money, insane moderators, the government who doesn't want you to host hate messages.

In concept, the threadiverse (Lemmy/kbin) should be able to overcome a few of these. In practice, we have yet to see

The only way is a truly decentralized system, but that’ll never happen. As long as someone has to pay to host someone else’s content, we run into problems.

Yes I've learned over the years to always ask: where does the money come from.

Sure a small hobby forum can be funded out of someone's pocket but something the size of Reddit? Not a chance.

A lot of the PhpBB and derivative sites are still up and active, they're just extremely undiscoverable on modern search engines.

There are still lots of them. Unfortunately, many of them are overrun with ads. I don't mind advertising (on these sites it's at least pretty well targeted), but it does slow them down.

I've long known that reddit isn't good for my mood. Even though I unsubbed from all default subs and joined niche hobby subs, reddit is still frequently poison, especially with politics (and more importantly, low-effort political "takes") just infecting the least-relevant places.

This whole debacle has been the impetus I needed. I'll let myself read reddit links surfaced by my search engine (because that's ostensibly useful, not mindless scrolling), but I haven't felt any urge to casually browse at all.

I have had the same experience

I was mostly watching cats/pets, and funny and interesting videos/photos/memes.

It was great for time pass and didn’t affect my mood at all.

If you start going into politics and the discussions around them, you will definitely get affected.

But it’s not the platform, it’s how you use it.

Anyway, I’ll definitely miss it as I refuse to switch from Apollo to the native app. It sucks.

same. i also did this with twitter when elon took over. i haven’t been tempted at all to log in to either despite spending probably the majority of my time online between the two for years. and it’s weirdly fine.