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> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube

> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point. I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side. They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day. Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.

weird-eye-issue 1mo ago
X is honestly among the worst of the worst. People give purposefully bad takes just for the engagement and it's overall super toxic Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life
- esskay 1mo ago
  I'm mostly passive on reddit these days but really struggle to leave it as I do enjoy seeing things like cool projects people are making on /r/selfhosting and such. Every time I think of leaving it I just think well I cant because where will i find out about cool new projects now.
  - dd8601fn 1mo ago
    I know it’s not the same but I watch stuff like hackaday and others with an rss reader, now. Old school approach. It helps jail the types of content I passively consume. I blocked reddit and most other social media with the pihole I was using anyway. After having been away from Reddit for a couple years now, I think it was a good trade. But obviously that’s a very personal thing.
- techpression 1mo ago
  LinkedIn is up there too, the reality distortion and appearance of everyone being a self made trillionaire can make the strongest of minds feel like they’re utter failures. It’s of course not true and 90% seem to be pure bullshit, but who has time to investigate ever thought leader post they get shoved in their face
- tmikaeld 1mo ago
  I’m on X for tech interest, new hardware, robotics, coding. If X didn’t allow blocking words/phrases, I could not use it! And yes, my blocklist is huge..
- wartywhoa23 1mo ago
  X also actively mocks you. I'm strongly anti-AI, and it would fill my whole feed with AI evangelist crap and viral AI PR ragebait. But it's good, it made me quit the motherfucker. Still hanging on to HN, its weaker doppelganger, though :)
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- KoftaBob 1mo ago
  > downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind Not just the hivemind, Reddit has been thoroughly astroturfed for a long time now. The vast majority of large subreddits have at least 1-2 mods who stifle/amplify discourse in the service of companies, think tanks, and certain Levantine pariah nations.
- mitxela 1mo ago
  Reddit is also botted to hell, it's the epitome of dead internet theory these days. Bots talking to bots and upvoting bots.
dd8601fn 1mo ago
I have a predisposition for that, and Reddit is indeed poison for some of us. I blocked it with pihole, along with most other social media sites, years ago. Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it. And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone. It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.
- mrweasel 1mo ago
  PiHole was my solution as well, and then Reddit decided to help. The "new" Reddit interface is still horrible and unusable, so old.reddit.com was always my go to. I don't have or want a Reddit account, I just wanted to follow a few sub-reddits. Now old.reddit.com is blocked for users without an account and they appear to be rolling out something similar to the site in general. You can see a few posts, and the a pop-up appears and requires you to sign in. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.
Lagoon3384_SWE 1mo ago
Reddit on defaults is a crazy experience. Subs with names like /r/wowlookatthis are posting blatant "west bad" propaganda. Making USA and EU people feel bad. Yet I walk outside in Sweden and I'm in one of the best functioning and beautiful nations in the world. Yet Swedish Reddit will post "west bad" propaganda on how everything is right wing doom. I mean from their perspective, sure... but so so so wrong they are. I just hope they get some refugees in their houses. I have some curated subreddits I use for work related stuff. For politics it is suffering. Now watch the left think it is due to right wing dominance. Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy.
- ciupicri 1mo ago
  > r/Wowlookatthis is banned > This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated.
  - Lagoon3384_SWE 1mo ago
    I made up a subreddit. But check out r/pics & r/interestingasfuck They are crazy especially after Oct 7. Constant pro-pali posts. /r/sweden is a leftie craphole. same with /r/tillsverige and /r/svenskpolitik
- mitxela 1mo ago
  > Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy. Worldnews bans you instantly if you disagree with Israel. That's a default sub, yeah? Left or right wing?
  - hirvi74 1mo ago
    Is the topic of Israel and Palestine truly that decisive across some binary party lines? I know people with a wide range of opinions both sides. I feel like it's more loud social media echo chambers than some sort of political schism.
    - qlte 1mo ago
      The comment you're replying to is refuting the parent's statement that all default Reddit subs are "left wing".
Seattle3503 1mo ago
I'm a frequent Reddit user. Recently they have been bringing some of the more poisonous elements of social media over to their platform. Pushing a "for you" feed, and prioritizing a "Best" sorting algorithm over "new" or "hot".
- talon8635 1mo ago
  Recently, as in a decade ago
Marsymars 1mo ago
> When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. It can be, but it can also (still) be sanitized. I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible. There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.
- tejtm 1mo ago
  old.reddit is no longer available (to no account me) as of a week ago. a few withdrawal pangs, but the mainstream version is a nope.
  - Marsymars 1mo ago
    Yeah, I don't mind using an account, but when/if they take away old.reddit entirely, I'm done replying. I'll keep checking my city page every now and then as long as my self-hosted eddrit instance keeps working.
biophysboy 1mo ago
I genuinely think Reddit is basically cable news for millenials.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
genghisjahn 1mo ago
My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. It’s hard giving up those sites, not because that’s where the people are but because we are all addicted to them. If you switch to mastodon or pixelfed, you’ll find good stuff there, but you won’t engage with it as much because it’s not algo driven, which to me is a win.
- voncheese 1mo ago
  > My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me. The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad). Thank you for the statement!
- acutesoftware 1mo ago
  That is good, but it should be qualified a little. If the algorithm simply says "sort by most recent", then it is pretty good. It is the profit driven algorithms that are doing the damage.
- biophysboy 1mo ago
  yes, the fundamental BS assumption of algorithmic social media is that human desire and curiosity is legible, and can be calculated in a straightforward way.
- 6510 1mo ago
  ATM the killer product would be a "bring your own algo" message board/socio thing/infinite scroll endorphin generator/etc I run a simple badword filter on my rss aggregator and it already outperforms anything big tech can come up with by a very large margin. Back when advertisements weren't 40 minute long I one time fell asleep while watching youtube on auto play. It was already very horny for Donald Trump as the US election was coming up but after watching a few of those the algo became convinced I wanted to watch nothing else. When I woke up ~8 hours later it had filled the entire front page and all side bar video suggestions with the face of that unbearable retard. I'm convinced this is how youtube changes all of us into ufologists. After this came a period where I more-carefully picked the videos I watched. Before I would watch anything that spiked my curiosity. This changed into "Do I want this in my feed for the next 3 weeks?". I just looked for an example and my feed has a bitcoin video. I've been waiting for those to go away for 15 years. I don't question someone is interested in those. My own word filter is like, go ahead, say it once, say the word, say bitcoin one time, try me. Oddly, if an article consistently calls it BC without explaining what it refers to it might actually be worth reading. I suggest someone creates something like an app store or extension platform where the user can pick or buy their own algorithms each with their own exotic brand of configuration screen. You could entirely create one that costs thousands per month to run and is actually worth it. Have it take in my browser history, my investment portfolio, the books I own, the conversations my phone listened in on, check my agenda how much time I have for doomscrolling and my activity for how much time I actually sink into it. Dump a bunch of llm tokens into the task. Run some complicated prompts.
SkyeCA 1mo ago
Reddit is a site which I would only recommend to someone I truly hated. It's poison on every level imaginable, more so than basically any other social media I've ever used. People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.
- mitxela 1mo ago
  And it doesn't feel like poison. I haven't used Reddit in several years so I don't know how it is now, but I used to feel yucky if I visited Facebook or Instagram, but not Reddit.
  - 6510 1mo ago
    I tried to use it a year ago just to see what it was really like. It ended rather quickly with me staring at my own comment looking for ways to twist what I wrote into something ban worthy. Then it happened again! LOL! 1985 Johannes Paulus II visited the Netherlands and some comedians made a song about it that was on TV. The song text is roughly that he enjoys his job and that he has to visit NL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4QL5EnHgvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4QL5EnHgvc This is apparently an extremely offending video according to some anon reddit inquisitor. I took his advice, I wont let it happen again.
    - mitxela 1mo ago
      The real offence is posting without being a bot. The subreddit has to look a certain way, idk what they have in mind but always something, they use bots to make it look that way, you can also post if you contribute to the project but if you ever go against their unstated wishes, then bam!
      - LogicFailsMe 1mo ago
        All of this existed before, all the way back to BBS culture (minus the bots mostly). What Reddit did was hyperscale it. People are tribal and they enforce adherence to their chosen tribe's ways. It's pretty depressing to look back and see that one of the quickest paths to three commas was to monetize it.

weird-eye-issue 1mo ago

X is honestly among the worst of the worst. People give purposefully bad takes just for the engagement and it's overall super toxic Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life

esskay 1mo ago
I'm mostly passive on reddit these days but really struggle to leave it as I do enjoy seeing things like cool projects people are making on /r/selfhosting and such. Every time I think of leaving it I just think well I cant because where will i find out about cool new projects now.
- dd8601fn 1mo ago
  I know it’s not the same but I watch stuff like hackaday and others with an rss reader, now. Old school approach. It helps jail the types of content I passively consume. I blocked reddit and most other social media with the pihole I was using anyway. After having been away from Reddit for a couple years now, I think it was a good trade. But obviously that’s a very personal thing.
techpression 1mo ago
LinkedIn is up there too, the reality distortion and appearance of everyone being a self made trillionaire can make the strongest of minds feel like they’re utter failures. It’s of course not true and 90% seem to be pure bullshit, but who has time to investigate ever thought leader post they get shoved in their face
tmikaeld 1mo ago
I’m on X for tech interest, new hardware, robotics, coding. If X didn’t allow blocking words/phrases, I could not use it! And yes, my blocklist is huge..
wartywhoa23 1mo ago
X also actively mocks you. I'm strongly anti-AI, and it would fill my whole feed with AI evangelist crap and viral AI PR ragebait. But it's good, it made me quit the motherfucker. Still hanging on to HN, its weaker doppelganger, though :)
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
KoftaBob 1mo ago
> downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind Not just the hivemind, Reddit has been thoroughly astroturfed for a long time now. The vast majority of large subreddits have at least 1-2 mods who stifle/amplify discourse in the service of companies, think tanks, and certain Levantine pariah nations.
mitxela 1mo ago
Reddit is also botted to hell, it's the epitome of dead internet theory these days. Bots talking to bots and upvoting bots.

dd8601fn 1mo ago

I have a predisposition for that, and Reddit is indeed poison for some of us. I blocked it with pihole, along with most other social media sites, years ago. Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it. And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone. It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.

mrweasel 1mo ago
PiHole was my solution as well, and then Reddit decided to help. The "new" Reddit interface is still horrible and unusable, so old.reddit.com was always my go to. I don't have or want a Reddit account, I just wanted to follow a few sub-reddits. Now old.reddit.com is blocked for users without an account and they appear to be rolling out something similar to the site in general. You can see a few posts, and the a pop-up appears and requires you to sign in. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.

Lagoon3384_SWE 1mo ago

Reddit on defaults is a crazy experience. Subs with names like /r/wowlookatthis are posting blatant "west bad" propaganda. Making USA and EU people feel bad. Yet I walk outside in Sweden and I'm in one of the best functioning and beautiful nations in the world. Yet Swedish Reddit will post "west bad" propaganda on how everything is right wing doom. I mean from their perspective, sure... but so so so wrong they are. I just hope they get some refugees in their houses. I have some curated subreddits I use for work related stuff. For politics it is suffering. Now watch the left think it is due to right wing dominance. Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy.

ciupicri 1mo ago
> r/Wowlookatthis is banned > This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated.
- Lagoon3384_SWE 1mo ago
  I made up a subreddit. But check out r/pics & r/interestingasfuck They are crazy especially after Oct 7. Constant pro-pali posts. /r/sweden is a leftie craphole. same with /r/tillsverige and /r/svenskpolitik
mitxela 1mo ago
> Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy. Worldnews bans you instantly if you disagree with Israel. That's a default sub, yeah? Left or right wing?
- hirvi74 1mo ago
  Is the topic of Israel and Palestine truly that decisive across some binary party lines? I know people with a wide range of opinions both sides. I feel like it's more loud social media echo chambers than some sort of political schism.
  - qlte 1mo ago
    The comment you're replying to is refuting the parent's statement that all default Reddit subs are "left wing".

Seattle3503 1mo ago

I'm a frequent Reddit user. Recently they have been bringing some of the more poisonous elements of social media over to their platform. Pushing a "for you" feed, and prioritizing a "Best" sorting algorithm over "new" or "hot".

talon8635 1mo ago
Recently, as in a decade ago

Marsymars 1mo ago

> When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. It can be, but it can also (still) be sanitized. I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible. There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.

tejtm 1mo ago
old.reddit is no longer available (to no account me) as of a week ago. a few withdrawal pangs, but the mainstream version is a nope.
- Marsymars 1mo ago
  Yeah, I don't mind using an account, but when/if they take away old.reddit entirely, I'm done replying. I'll keep checking my city page every now and then as long as my self-hosted eddrit instance keeps working.

biophysboy 1mo ago

I genuinely think Reddit is basically cable news for millenials.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

genghisjahn 1mo ago

My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. It’s hard giving up those sites, not because that’s where the people are but because we are all addicted to them. If you switch to mastodon or pixelfed, you’ll find good stuff there, but you won’t engage with it as much because it’s not algo driven, which to me is a win.

voncheese 1mo ago
> My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me. The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad). Thank you for the statement!
acutesoftware 1mo ago
That is good, but it should be qualified a little. If the algorithm simply says "sort by most recent", then it is pretty good. It is the profit driven algorithms that are doing the damage.
biophysboy 1mo ago
yes, the fundamental BS assumption of algorithmic social media is that human desire and curiosity is legible, and can be calculated in a straightforward way.
6510 1mo ago
ATM the killer product would be a "bring your own algo" message board/socio thing/infinite scroll endorphin generator/etc I run a simple badword filter on my rss aggregator and it already outperforms anything big tech can come up with by a very large margin. Back when advertisements weren't 40 minute long I one time fell asleep while watching youtube on auto play. It was already very horny for Donald Trump as the US election was coming up but after watching a few of those the algo became convinced I wanted to watch nothing else. When I woke up ~8 hours later it had filled the entire front page and all side bar video suggestions with the face of that unbearable retard. I'm convinced this is how youtube changes all of us into ufologists. After this came a period where I more-carefully picked the videos I watched. Before I would watch anything that spiked my curiosity. This changed into "Do I want this in my feed for the next 3 weeks?". I just looked for an example and my feed has a bitcoin video. I've been waiting for those to go away for 15 years. I don't question someone is interested in those. My own word filter is like, go ahead, say it once, say the word, say bitcoin one time, try me. Oddly, if an article consistently calls it BC without explaining what it refers to it might actually be worth reading. I suggest someone creates something like an app store or extension platform where the user can pick or buy their own algorithms each with their own exotic brand of configuration screen. You could entirely create one that costs thousands per month to run and is actually worth it. Have it take in my browser history, my investment portfolio, the books I own, the conversations my phone listened in on, check my agenda how much time I have for doomscrolling and my activity for how much time I actually sink into it. Dump a bunch of llm tokens into the task. Run some complicated prompts.

SkyeCA 1mo ago

Reddit is a site which I would only recommend to someone I truly hated. It's poison on every level imaginable, more so than basically any other social media I've ever used. People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.

mitxela 1mo ago
And it doesn't feel like poison. I haven't used Reddit in several years so I don't know how it is now, but I used to feel yucky if I visited Facebook or Instagram, but not Reddit.
- 6510 1mo ago
  I tried to use it a year ago just to see what it was really like. It ended rather quickly with me staring at my own comment looking for ways to twist what I wrote into something ban worthy. Then it happened again! LOL! 1985 Johannes Paulus II visited the Netherlands and some comedians made a song about it that was on TV. The song text is roughly that he enjoys his job and that he has to visit NL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4QL5EnHgvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4QL5EnHgvc This is apparently an extremely offending video according to some anon reddit inquisitor. I took his advice, I wont let it happen again.
  - mitxela 1mo ago
    The real offence is posting without being a bot. The subreddit has to look a certain way, idk what they have in mind but always something, they use bots to make it look that way, you can also post if you contribute to the project but if you ever go against their unstated wishes, then bam!
    - LogicFailsMe 1mo ago
      All of this existed before, all the way back to BBS culture (minus the bots mostly). What Reddit did was hyperscale it. People are tribal and they enforce adherence to their chosen tribe's ways. It's pretty depressing to look back and see that one of the quickest paths to three commas was to monetize it.