Re: How do I go back to the library?

I dropped Reddit about 8 years ago, after a decade of near-daily use.

At that point, I

• was moderator of a number of subreddits (not huge ones, but at least one had ~19K members),
• exchanged messages on at least a weekly basis with several friends whom I only really knew through Reddit,
• had attended in-person community meetups, and
• had dropped enough cash into it as a “charter member” that, when that got converted into “gold”, gave me “premium” that won’t run out until 2029

Reddit had been going downhill for a while already: I gather it’s gotten a lot worse since.

Frankly, it started to go downhill when user-generated subreddits were invented and every nazi snake in the world suddenly thought they’d found a place to hang out. Or maybe when it became a place to organise doxxing and brigading and vigilantism. But whenever the tipping point was it came from a slow decline, not the much-faster one that came later on with the “new” interface and the blocking of the APIs and the pushing of the app and basically every policy Pao enacted.

Nowadays I hear they’re into NFTs and censoring people at Musk’s request and stripping moderators out of subreddits whose content doesn’t line-up with the advertisers they want to get in, so I guess things are even worse still.

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Anyway: for me… I just quietly vanished. I said goodbye to some of the friends in the private communities I was in, or by private message (which were still a thing back then), ensuring that they knew where they could find me in the wider Internet. I did a data backup/export, and retro-reposted some of my posts to my blog. I had a script trash the first ten years of comments I’d ever posted to the site, because I was feeling spiteful, replacing them all with the same message about how Reddit’s getting shit. And then I logged out.

I’ve found smaller and quieter communities. I dug up my old Metafilter account: Metafilter predates Reddit and is, in many ways, a lot like Reddit was before Subreddits were a thing. It’s got its own culture and its own community which includes (a) strong moderation, so you’ll see less slop, and and (b) paying for your account, so you’ll see far fewer trolls. Plus, it’s a smaller site with a smaller membership. It listens to its community, and is transitioning into a non-profit.

There’s plenty of other “old” link sharing sites still going, too: I didn’t need to go further than Metafilter, but if they’re more your feel then I hear Slashdot and Fark are still ticking over, if you prefer your content more (a) nerdy and sarcastic or (b) childish and edgy, respectively.

Because mostly, the communities I’ve replaced Reddit with have been open-web communities. Indiewebbers, bloggers, smolweb enthusiasts. I shoot the breeze with arty folks on the Melonland Forums, swing over to Bubbles.town to get the “mood” of the blogosphere (it’s got to be the second-top place I go to “discover” personal blogs, now, after those mentioned by folks already in my RSS reader of course!), or swing over to a couple of newsgroups – yes, newsgroups are still a thing, and some of them are still alive! – if that’s where “my people” seem to be.

There’s a bigger wider world. You definitely don’t need Reddit.¹

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That said, I didn’t delete my account. And I’ve logged in, since, usually about once or twice a year. I’ve answered a few necro-replies that I’ve received, and I even posted to /r/TipOfMyJoystick the other month to help me remember a videogame I’d long forgotten. But every time it’s just a passing visit. I do what I came to do, log out again, and forget about the site for another six to twelve months.

It’s not a part of what I do online any more. Just another site that I don’t really use. Like Amazon!

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Anyway, I hope that helps with your journey. Good luck, buddy!