And even if I wanted to keep using Reddit, a lot of brain drain has already happened, so it’s so much less useful already, and it really feels like one of my favorite tools is suddenly obsolete.

I remember when I accidentally became a moderator of /r/science because they asked for variety of domain expertise and I’m a geographer and c’mon… nobody’s a geographer. It was a fun experience. Then became an educational one. Then frustrating. Then thankless. Then I stopped.

I’m happy for the lessons. I’m sad it died years ago.

“Study Proves Republicans are Dumb”

It’s one of the laws of the internet: as the size of a community grows, the quality approaches a stadium full of drunk sweaty sports fans.

I get it!

The opposite has occurred and it wasn't very pretty to look at.

/r/drama banned people who posted in /r/teenagers and brought to surface a whole bundle of pedos

Granted, I don't think anything will change, but complacency is the moment reddit truly dies.

Fast forward 15 years, I now have a PhD largely due to the path that community helped set me on. You could follow a very similar journey of maturity for me through my Reddit history (and that’s the main reason I haven’t flushed my posts, even if I was an idiot at 14 that was my personal journey). The Reddit I joined changed a lot — we had characters like Bozarking and there was a strong libertarian element in contrast to today’s left leanings. I remember the Digg exodus changing Reddit fundamentally but not necessarily for the worse. The big subs declined by the niche ones blossomed and taught me much about my hobbies.

While I don’t expect to fully leave (Google will lead me there or I might have a question where I am not sure what other site has a pertinent community to ask), my use will decline 99% or more. I have long been aware a lot of Reddit has sucked but there was still a lot of value to be had. It’s also been apparent for years that Reddit, the company, has zero clue what users actually want (hint: it’s not 3 separate chat implementations, nfts, and profile pictures), however this open hostility towards the users and mods who volunteer their time (mods have had their problems but generally they are good, after all, you only notice the bad mods).

I won’t miss most of the absent scrolling I do on Reddit, but it also has been a bit like my childhood friend passing away. I am not sure what my online future will look like, but it will be strange without Reddit being there.

It was also a default one, IIRC, and when I joined had far more activity than /r/funny. Pretty sure a lot of people were very upset when it stopped being a default.

I was teaching myself to code when I first encountered Reddit, and I followed the language hype on proggit as if it were gospel - I learned Common Lisp because proggit was giddy that Reddit was written in it at the time, and I subsequently learned about macros, and functional programming, and that Erik Naggum wants you to get off his damn lawn and stop asking dumb questions in comp.lang.lisp, then it was the Ruby hype, then Erlang, then Haskell etc.

All very interesting stuff to delve into, but yeah, I thought I'd never get a job programming if I was struggling with Haskell's type system, look at all the regular workaday coders on Reddit who're loving it! (I know, I know.)

That said, I really benefited from the Erlang hype period, the ideas in Erlang/OTP were very interesting indeed, even if I didn't quite understand what a finite state machine was, and what it was useful for, when trying to grok gen_fsm. But the actor model, the deliberate choice to treat failure as normal and build accordingly, that stuck with me all these years. Hell, I even ended up printing off Joe Armstrong's thesis to read on the bus to work.

Reddit was a great replacement for forums, especially for technical topics, IMO. But their "reopen the sub or else landed gentry" approach directly hurts tech communities, because the mods of a technical sub are often domain experts in the technology it's focused on, and a lot will disengage and move on.

At least, I know two of my fellow mods in a small technical sub have disengaged dramatically because of Reddit's approach, and they will be a massive loss to the sub.

But then, small tech subreddits aren't exactly a massive money-making market niche, so yeah. It is sad though.

Reddit is infuriatingly sticky. Every time I land on a post from 10+ years ago (like this one [0] for example), I go to the author's profile page. Almost inevitably, they've written a comment within the last week. This is a remarkable property for a social website to have, and it's not one that I see exhibited in other places, like StackOverflow or ancient vBulletin forums.

I'd like to think that this is finally Reddit's "Digg moment," but I am just not convinced. The boycott was over in 48 hours and everything is back to normal, but people are just complaining more. Heck, the commenter I linked to from 11 years ago also commented two hours ago, unsurprisingly, complaining about the API changes.

As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it...

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rx9u9/til_gr...

I’m not going to claim that Reddit was a bastion of intellectualism back in the day, but the mean effort put into comments on the main subs has deteriorated over time and today might very well mark a discontinuity in that

It really was a lifestyle app. The account had comments on all the games I played as a teenager, fitness and university subreddits, random hobbies I picked up for a few months, basically every single one of my interests for the past decade. I had a NSFW burner that received frequent use. I have to say, you're pretty accurate about how I was basically active and commenting once or more a week for the majority of my conscious life. I started using the RiF app on a god awful 2010 phone when I created my account, and have used Sync since probably 2016.

I blanked then wiped all of my comments and then deleted my account two weeks ago. To be truthful, Reddit had a much different feel already, but nothing can stay constant for that long. It was already frustrating me that (my perceived) quality of discussion on the site has steadily become dumber and any mainstream news or political sub is astroturfed to hell (presumably by the Russians). I started seeing the emoji or "lol who cares" in response to perfectly normal comments. The East Palestine derailment frenzy was what made me realize that the website is definitely attacked by coordinated actors. I spent the last few months on the site browsing /r/neoliberal not because I necessarily agreed with the tenets of the ideology, but because it was one of the few reasonable political subs left, and /r/CredibleDefence for broadly pro-West but reasonable takes on the war.

I slowly realized that I was reading empty content. Much of my time on the site was seeing a clearly stupid, if not false comment, and realizing that the effort I would put in debunking or arguing was going to reach two or three eyeballs. Essentially, much of Reddit is the one eyed preaching to the blind. I frequently typed up long comments (much like this one) for an hour or so, and returned to maybe 4-5 upvotes, since the post had already peaked in popularity. I had a few long posts in /r/summonerschool , a League of Legends advice subreddit that were probably 10x the detail of any other comment advice and took me an hour to watch their gameplay and give specific comments.

In short, I felt I was trying to suck shit water from an Olympic sized pool through a lifestraw and hoping it would clean it up. The 3rd party app ban was a huge fucking slap to my face. Call me arrogant, but I believe I contributed more than my fair share to the running of Reddit by creating high quality discourse on the website. And in return? I get slapped with a shit UI and advertisements up my ass through the official app. And spez's response showed a complete lack of any attention to the website, to any concerns to the community that is most of the value proposition of their site. Their claims to be looking for profit now are transparent as fuck when you remember all their failed, clearly unmonetizable crap they've put dev hours and low interest money on in the past few years (NFTs, the other crypto crap, whatever RPAN was supposed to be). Coast by on institutional inertia while you piss away money, let the website decline in quality, and then aggressively try to monetize from the most loyal users (the decade long user who uses a third party app)? No thanks.

So yeah, I blew up my account. To be honest, I am having some withdrawal symptoms and am trying hard not to relapse, but I see it as the only moral route to proceed. The internet is broadly really quite bad. Twitter is tolerable but has similar ethical issues and quality depends very much on topic. I am getting into Substack, but that is ultimately a newsletter publisher and not a discussion forum. Any non-reddit result on Google is unusable. Maybe the internet will agree on a replacement. Maybe it keeps on spiralling down the enshittification drain. For now, HackerNews occupies the space on my phone's home screen that Reddit used to. I hope the future isn't as crap as I anticipate.

Rant over.

1. Deleted users aren't going to pop up as much

2. It's going to be highly dependent on your search history. I'm sure more technically minded people will be around more often than results found on news subs or some more specific hobbies.

3. Commenting last week doesn't mean they are a regular commenter. Many of those people IME comment much less frequently later on. Maybe from a daily commenter to a weekly or monthly one. They are around, but not as active.

>As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it...

On a macro level, sure. I think anyone hoping for a sudden implosion was dreaming. But many are talking long term, a death by a million papercuts. There will be no one reason reddit dies.

Also, sample of one: I did in fact leave years ago. Still lurked w/o an account, but these actions caused me to try and replace nearly every community I have.

The main hole atm is a steady stream of gaming discussions. So i unfortunately may spend some 15 minutes browsing some niche gaming subs for certain news.

I recognise that journey!

for tech/science discussions: slashdot > HN for entertainment: rss > reddit > ? (help)

It's a damn fucking shame.

I refuse to use the official app, and the new site crashes safari in the iOS beta, so Reddit is now dead to me. I’ve dropped by a couple of times but since the changes and blackout all of the good subs I follow are empty/dead. They lost me as a user.

1) Reading assistance for people with sight impairment. Reddit has granted a pass for some apps on this basis though.

2) Moderation and Modmail. For people on the move, or, for example, where you're in front of a business PC or laptop all day, with Web restrictions or personal use policies. The mobile apps were extremely useful for moderation.

I did use the Boost app, but have moved to the official Reddit one for mod work; it's buggy and prone to erroring when trying to complete an action so you have to keep repeating things to make them 'stick'.

This is why the mods are up in arms because it's hard work at the best of times.

But with two major caveats. This is only for non-profit apps, which excludes almost all of them. For Android there is only RedReader now and for iOS there are Luna and Dystopia left.

And still without any NSFW content.

And to be honest, I think old.reddit is also on its way out. It's inevitable. So we're going to experience this shit storm all over again.

I support the protests so I'm trying to use reddit less for news and stuff. But for certain needs I'd scour forums for, since those forums no longer exist, I kind of need to check reddit for some stuff. Things related to my health and such.

It helps for readers now, and archaeologists later!

It was not the only website of its kind, but it was the fastest for news updates and also had some content on other sites like it didn't (such as slashdot, which had the tech and science stuff but not much else). I would repost stuff to FB and managed to garner a decent amount of clout that way. It went along like that for some years but eventually reddit 'hit mainstream' and the content I reposted didn't get the same traction. At that time I remember thinking reddit wasn't "underground" anymore. I recall that thought occurring in 2012.

But that still didn't stop me from using it, except for a couple breaks it was my primary source of info and discussion and debate for many years, even to this day.

However I'm at a point though where I feel like I need to divorce myself from social media entirely (perhaps even HN). The 'debates' / discussions / etc feel as though they have run their course for me. It's like groundhog day where I feel like I've had the same interactions 1000 times over to the extent where I don't feel like it's worth the effort.

But at the same time living without social media makes my world feel much smaller. I only talk to a handful of people, my friend group has dwindled significantly, and adding new folks has become really difficult, even with sparse usage. I feel like I was so dependent on social media for so long to keep in touch with people that, now living without it, I have practically no social connections.

This has been exacerbated by my decision to live a sober life, free of any and all mind altering substances. Going out to a bar or music night loses most of its appeal without alcohol involved. Likewise for gaming without smoking. Between all this and no social media, my life has become really... Well, boring I guess. spend my days reading books, and going to the gym. It's more boring than it sounds. No social media also means no gigs and that's a bummer, may have to start looking for steady employment.

Anyway to stay on topic, I don't know what a world looks like without these things that have taken up so much of my life in the last 15+ years. I'm just trying to take it one day at a time. I want to develop other hobbies but thus far the motivation I previously leveraged from caffeinated beverages has dried up as well. So I guess I can just wait and see, and try to remain optimistic.

Reports of Reddit’s death have been greatly exaggerated.