Reddit was arguably the last “social media” I was using until a few weeks ago with the protest. I resigned as a moderator of a decently large sub and deleted the app. Let me tell you, it has been the best few weeks for me mentally in years. I set up inoreader and only grabbed a couple of publication/writers I really like. I don’t doom scroll, there’s no capability for comments so I don’t get dragged into any arguments, and even with HN still in my life the churn and burn of content and simplicity/general culture keeps me to a few comments a week at most.

I know a lot of people talk about “delete Facebook/hit the gym” etc. but gym or not, my life is infinitely better without social media now. It is very clear to me that it’s not even a situation where the cons outweighs the pros now, there simply aren’t any pros left.

Someone enumerated the issues with Reddit, as well as social media writ large, at the start of the Reddit blackout. There’s a lot of interesting insight about the failures of Web 2.0 from a consumer standpoint, but one line at the end really resonated with me: “The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.“ Obviously that’s a pretty broad stroke and we should always be wary of rose-tinted glasses, but I can’t say I don’t get what they mean.