Forget About Reddit!

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Tylor Kobierski

Just don’t go there anymore. It’s fine. You’re finally free.

It’s not anything but a problem, really. You might think that it has some level of utility, but it does not. Certainly not the amount of time that you likely spend on there.

What have you gotten out of it? Can you remember what you were browsing ten months ago? I would hazard to guess that you do not. You might remember that some major event happened, and you might remember that you were looking at reddit at the time, but if reddit were out of that equation, you would not even notice its absence.

The content feed is the worst invention. It keeps you there, even if you do not want to be there. Whether you’re on reddit or twitter or facebook, it’s all the same. It wants to suck you in, and show you something that is interesting. But to get to something interesting requires you to wade through a million posts that are anything but interesting, or of very mild or fleeting value. To spend a lot of time on reddit is to find a diamond in a landfill once, and claim that is enough to justify digging for another diamond a few more years.

I would not even migrate to Lemmy, even if it is decentralized. Leave the very idea behind. What these systems do to you is bad: they make it uncomfortable to be bored, and being bored is essential to being able to think about things that are interesting. You may think that you need to keep fresh with new ideas, but that is only part of the equation. Without any rumination, synthesis is impossible. You will continue you accrue facts that do not get you anywhere and kind of hope that one day that will lead to some sort of epiphany that will never come.

Take some breaks from your feeds. Write your thoughts out on a physical notepad. Take some steps to finally finish that project you were always wanting to build. Your muscles might miss all of the content, but I’m not sure you will. Your attention is valuable, don’t give it away so freely! Save it for the people you find interesting.