I've officially abandoned Reddit

[Guest]

I doubt any of you will actually care or not, but I decided to take down my reddit account about two days ago. A number of reasons had led me to that decision. 

 

1.I got really tired of the extremism and echo chambers for a number of different causes (i.e. communists/radical socialists (as in full on Soviet, North Korean, and other extreme Communist or Socialist regimes apologists), really extreme anti-theists, radical feminist and men’s rights activists, the alt-right, etc). These users also tend to be extremely arrogant, and they seem to make it their life goal to showcase their intellectual superiority to anonymous randos on the internet.

 

2.Reddit has consumed my life too much, and it had become an obsession for me. Just about every day in the last couple years, I've spend several hours a day on reddit. It really took a toll on my performances on my collage classes.

 

3.As I mentioned before, users tend to be incredibly uncivil, and will look for any excuse to throw ad hominems at you. For example, sometimes I come across memes that I fond funny on Pinterest. So I decided to share to some meme oriented subreddit. Then I get my inbox bombarded with responses calling me a "reposter", "karma whore/farmer", "meme thief" etc. On most occasions though, the insults are usually so extremely lazy and vague, you usually can't even tell what the commenters are trying to get at. Another time, I wrote a very detailed account of my harassment experiences about two years ago now. One user called me a "fucking weirdo" and told me to "piss off". Fortunately, the subreddit's mods removed that comment a short time later. Another wrote a very detailed reply, on why they thought my experience was fake. At certain points, up to 30% of my notifications were replies insulting me or the posts I made.

 

4.The power mods are very difficult to deal with. It's annoying when they stealth remove your posts (or even throw temporarily bans at you), and then they ghost your message or send a passive aggressive reply back when you inquire what rules your post violated.

 

It was a very difficult decision for me. As I had so much fun contributing to the discussions of topics that interest me, and I loved the feeling of validation when your karma points go up. Even after two days, I still really miss Reddit. However I feel getting away from the toxicity of reddit and removing distractions from my life will be good for it. So far, my sleep patterns have improved, and I no longer fret over the possible replies and downvotes. Has anyone here had similar experiences with Reddit?

[sologdin]

arguing for a thesis exorbitant to purportedly respectable bourgeois liberalism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for arrogance or for an intentional display of intellectual superiority. perhaps uncharitable, likewise, to infer these mens rea from the actus reus of disagreement with the status quo, which itself is never caricatured with a dismissive tag such as 'extreme' even though it leads to more explosives dropped on vietnam than were dropped in all theaters by all belligerents in the second world war, say.

it may well be that the rest of the world is an echo chamber for the cause of purportedly respectable bourgeois liberalism; those who are confronted with challenges to it might engage those challenges with curiosity and humility.

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, sologdin said:

arguing for a thesis exorbitant to purportedly respectable bourgeois liberalism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for arrogance or for an intentional display of intellectual superiority. perhaps uncharitable, likewise, to infer these mens rea from the actus reus of disagreement with the status quo, which itself is never caricatured with a dismissive tag such as 'extreme' even though it leads to more explosives dropped on vietnam than were dropped in all theaters by all belligerents in the second world war, say.

it may well be that the rest of the world is an echo chamber for the cause of purportedly respectable bourgeois liberalism; those who are confronted with challenges to it might engage those challenges with curiosity and humility.

Good to know, and I appreciate your input. However, I don't think that pertains to my post much, other then fixating on a passing sentence that was inconsequential to my frustrations with reddit's culture as a whole.

[Soylent Brown]

My last post on Reddit has 7 upvotes. I am a God among men!

[Soylent Brown]

Okay, it's down to 5 now.

Still feeling mostly good, though I was speaking to my mum earlier and now I'm worried that her river-dipping technique isn't as comprehensive as I was previously lead to believe.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Soylent Brown said:

Okay, it's down to 5 now.

The upvote count always fluctuates. It's a reddit mechanism to confuse and deter bots

[Pecan]

I don't understand how someone could spend 4-8 hours a day on Reddit. Is this a common thing?

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, Pecan said:

I don't understand how someone could spend 4-8 hours a day on Reddit. Is this a common thing?

It's actually an over exaggeration, but I did spend an healthy amount of time on that website. You'll be surprised by how much free time people seem to have on reddit.

[Pecan]

7 minutes ago, Otherdude said:

It's actually an over exaggeration, but I did spend an healthy amount of time on that website. You'll be surprised by how much free time people seem to have on reddit.

I suppose it was an addiction of sorts, correct? You're posting and commenting, and then watching to see how people react, and if they upvote you, then you get that little dopamine hit, right? It's the same basic mechanic that video games use. I've felt that on Reddit as well. I'll write a comment and then check back periodically to see if it got upvoted or downvoted. But my Karma after 5+ years is only about 7500. I'm guessing yours was quite a bit higher if you were spending huge amounts of time there.

[Guest]

23 minutes ago, Pecan said:

I suppose it was an addiction of sorts, correct? You're posting and commenting, and then watching to see how people react, and if they upvote you, then you get that little dopamine hit, right? It's the same basic mechanic that video games use. I've felt that on Reddit as well. I'll write a comment and then check back periodically to see if it got upvoted or downvoted. But my Karma after 5+ years is only about 7500. I'm guessing yours was quite a bit higher if you were spending huge amounts of time there.

Correct. It pretty much was an addiction for me. At my peak, I had nearly over 400,000 karma points. Yet, that is just a drop in the bucket compared to some users, like gallowboob have 36 million points. I should have made that decision to drop reddit a long time ago. As much fun it was and how much I learned from it, I feel like my excessive use of reddit had a detrimental effect of my life.

[Pecan]

^ Thanks for being so willing to talk about it. 

[DaveSumm]

I have a love hate thing with Reddit. There’s definitely a lot of hours of my life that I could have accomplished something with and instead mindlessly scrolled through Reddit. On the other hand, it’s the only ‘social media’ I use (if we’re calling it that) where you can just follow what you like and not worry about getting stuff you don’t want forced into your feed. You like cute animals? Then subscribe to r/aww and that’s all you’ll see. There’s no bot saying “oh, if you like that then maybe you’ll like this?” to steer you away from the topic.

Now, I try and stick to my home feed which is all fairly niche subjects (board games, coffee, some tv shows, etc) and I can catch up fairly quickly browsing by hot. Again, I’m OK with ‘hot’ for some reason but I can’t stand Twitter and Instagram rearranging my feed. At least Reddit is based on upvotes, whereas other algorithms seem a bit more insidious as to why certain things rise to the top.

[DireWolfSpirit]

18 hours ago, Guest said:

2.Reddit has consumed my life too much, and it had become an obsession for me. Just about every day in the last couple years, I've spend several hours a day on reddit. It really took a toll on my performances on my collage classes.

This alone says enough to justify your decision to walk away. That much screen time could also potentially have negative effects on your vision over a period of time I'm guessing as well.

If it's consuming you then it's time to try other activities imo.

[Rhom]

17 hours ago, Pecan said:

I don't understand how someone could spend 4-8 hours a day on Reddit. Is this a common thing?

I'd hate to see how much time I spend on this board...

[Starkess]

I liked reddit. It's a very different site depending on which sub-reddits you hang out in. I try to avoid the ones with toxic communities. I also don't really bother to check my own karma very much--they're fake internet points that literally matter for nothing. I just checked and I have ~5000 post karma and ~32k comment karma.

[Werthead]

On 6/6/2020 at 12:32 AM, Pecan said:

I don't understand how someone could spend 4-8 hours a day on Reddit. Is this a common thing?

Reddit is just a super-forum, like Westeros.org but there's a subcommunity for every single thing in the universe (more or less), so I can easily see why people spend a lot of time on it.

The trick is to set the number of subreddits you're interested in and just check those out, and not get sucked into some rabbit hole and end up debating types of pinecone on a pinecone subreddit at 3am wondering how the hell you got there.

[Spockydog]

r/tippytaps

[Larry of the Lawn]

My brain doesn't work for reddit, I don't quite get the format and its not always clear to me what post came first or is being quoted or why some show up and others don't.  Haven't messed with it in awhile unless someone links to it.  

Also why is the OP a guest htf do you post anonymously here as a guest?

 

[Soylent Brown]

23 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

My brain doesn't work for reddit, I don't quite get the format and its not always clear to me what post came first or is being quoted or why some show up and others don't.  Haven't messed with it in awhile unless someone links to it.  

Also why is the OP a guest htf do you post anonymously here as a guest?

 

He started the thread as a real boy, but then self-destructed before he became too addicted to this place and its sweet, sweet Likes!

[Larry of the Lawn]

49 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

He started the thread as a real boy, but then self-destructed before he became too addicted to this place and its sweet, sweet Likes!

I have my account here rigged so that when someone likes one of my posts my phone injects me with serotonin and if they laugh it juices me with dopamine.  Maybe the OP should just get a similar hardware upgrade and cut-out the middleman.

A simple quote or @ and I get a small electrical charge to the adrenal gland.  Anybody feel free to venmo me $500 and I can show you a PowerPoint presentation in how you too can physically let the board into your life.