I went searching for something today and instinctually clicked on a reddit link. Fortunately the sub was dark for the protest anyway, but it’s crazy how ingrained in me it is to go to reddit for everything.
Unfortunately now we’re going to have to get used to clicking on those clickbait tech articles like “TOP 10 FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES 2023” to find information, and weed out the crappy blogs.
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The fact is that there is some useful info that only is on Reddit. No shame in looking that stuff up since that’s where it is.
The main thing is to stop using Reddit as your go-to time waster/doom scrolling app
If people stop providing useful information on reddit, it’s usefulness will disappear over time.
There are also lots of people using Shreddit to remove their entire log of comments.
I’m debating whether or not to do that with my account… I have several comments with solutions to specific tech issues, documentation on specific things. At the same time, I feel less and less comfortable with Reddit benefiting from information users provided for free.
I’ve been on the fence about wiping my account as well. It’s just hard for me - my history, wholesome interaction with users, friends made, how many people I’ve helped, I’ve written a few guides. Man it just sucks. (the largest guide I’ve written, for Vindictus, is partially outdated, but also I put in sooooooo much effort into it and I’m really proud of it. maybe I’ll download and save as a .doc or something)
I think I just need to hear someone’s stance on it, hear their points, and be persuaded
I also need to figure out -when- to do that if I end up doing it. I assume before the 30th, but I’m not sure if some have started doing it already, and why
Request your data. Upload the contents wherever you please. https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
It’s not worth continuing to bring attention to Reddit as a platform when we can export the meaningful stuff and host it elsewhere that actually values the community itself rather than the monetary income that the users could provide.
If you don’t have too many maybe consider posting them on Lemmy as new posts before deleting them? Keeps the information discoverable and helps populate Lemmy with good content, while giving Reddit the middle finger - TRIPLE WIN!
Grab those comments and repost them in a place where you are more comfortable. You can keep that knowledge out there without needing to keep your account if you don’t want to. Some of those apps actually give you your comment history in a file when they’re done.
Honestly? ChatGPT (4) is basically a stackoverflow 2.0. It’s my goto when I want help with specific problems. There are alternative options, is what I mean.
I deleted all my comments on Reddit. I do not want them to benefit from my knowledge even if it might inconvenience someone else
The big problem with chatGTP is that you never can be sure that it’s right, you need to check it. On reddit and sites like it, you can see the amount of upvotes, which shows you if they are right or not.
I have seen a lot of highly upvoted comments on reddit which were very, very wrong.
I still use reddit for help on things. But for topics that I’m less knowledgeable about (so I can’t gauge the accuracy myself), I try to just take everything with a grain of salt.
True, but the chance of it being wrong is substantially smaller than the chance of chatGTP dreaming up something.
It helps that if something is wrong on Reddit, another redditor usually points it out since there are many eyes on any particular thread.
One of my favorite parts about reddit is people will always be there to call out your BS, whether it be via downvotes or a comment. I always appreciated that because more times than not, they will tell them they’re wrong and explain why, sometimes even with sources. A lot of the time, they redirect people to better sources of information, like a telegram group about a custom android rom
Of course, this isn’t true 100% of the time, not even downvoted comment is wrong - like the other person commented, it’s fair to take it with a grain of salt
That’s why my solution for this is to research a topic EXTENSIVELY by reading tons of threads and comments about it, put them all together in my head and consider them all, and then decide on the best outcome/answer based on all the research combined. That way, I don’t just rely on 1 person’s response and hope they’re right. For most things though, them being wrong might not even make a huge negative impact
I’ve found that Redditors also generally have our backs - they warn us about stuff to do or not to do, that companies don’t warn us about because it would otherwise profit them
The big problem with chatGTP is that you never can be sure that it’s right
A lawyer wasnt aware of this and used it to do research on a case. It went poorly.
ONly thE BEsT aND BrIgHtEST PaSs THe BaR!!!
Jup, legal eagle fan here (:
We also don’t know if search engines will pay the new fees to index reddit, so that could potentially make it disappear faster.
Really? Doesn’t google and similar search engines use web crawlers, outside of the devloper API of reddit? Or is that different for reddit?
Currently yes, but I’d imagine they’re also going to disallow crawlers via robots.txt or what’s to stop OpenAI and friends from acquiring the corpus that way? Though of course that assumes this whole thing is really thought through which might be a big assumption on my part…
I think they will probably whitelist google’s and microsoft’s webcrawlers, seeing as it’s kinda a huge source of traffic for them. But I’m far from an expert in this field XD
Now I will doomscroll on Lemmy. Problem solved
Actually for the first time I’m contributing now, on reddit I tried a few times but I never liked it, and never did more than liking.
Tbh the lack of people and content here has limited my doom scrolling tremendously.
Also helps that everyone here is like a kid on their first day of high school or college. Zero toxicity! 😎
Give it time. The toxic trolls will soon realize they’re all just talking to each other and come to the fediverse for fresh meat.
I don’t think trolls think that hard. It’s all for instant gratification. There are few dedicated and motivated trolls. It’s a low effort sort of deal.
Same. I’m feeling so good about myself now.
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I think this is exactly right. I plan to use info available on reddit as reference material if needs be, but I will no longer be posting and therefore creating more content for reddit to sell on in the future.
Muscle memory is also hard to break. I had to remove Apollo from my homescreen :D
I have my 3rd party apps installed still but have put them behind an app locker so there’s an additional step if I knee-jerk! Also disabled notifications so they won’t tempt me in.
I know the feeling. I had to put it in a folder “Do not use”. It’s like the first rhing I check in the morning. This lemmy thing has potential. I miss Apollo so much though. Jesus if Christian ported Apollo to use a lemmy backend I’m not sure I’d even notice it wasn’t Reddit. 😀
I put Discord in its place, my muscle memory has been opening it all morning.
Did the same! Now I don’t have to think twice before clicking it.
I made a shortcut automation in iOS to close Apollo as soon as it’s opened. Works & has caught me in my habit a few times already. lmao
I replaced my reddit icon with Jerboa. I’m working on my own client in the mean time, though
Same lol. Replaced the icon with the Lemmy app for Android and here I am 👍🏻
We’re all in rehab 😐
Honestly I’m trying to retrain my brain to type beehaw instead of reddit as a reflex when I open a new tab. Beehaw is literally my rehab
I named my lemmy instance bookmark “Shmeddit”
@jellyfish It really makes me aware of how strong the muscle memory “I’m bored what should I read” impulse has become.
Today, I’ve spent all the time I would ordinarily waste on reddit trying to figure out Lemmy instead. It’s been fun! Honestly refreshing.
When Twitter seemed like it was going to suddenly implode last November (as opposed to the slow, slow death it opted for instead), I tried to hop onto Mastodon along with everyone else. My experience was bad. It was too slow. Too slow to use. Lemmy has been a great experience in comparison.
That’s the only issue with these multi-instance semi-decentralized solutions, we need users to spread out and learn how to sync in with the rest from there. Ideally, there would be some automated system to set users up on their lowest latency server with the most free capacity, or to be able to move a user to another server without having to start again.
I’m in the same boat. All my Apollo browsing time has been spent on learning this. I basically just tipped Christian £10 then checked out. mlem for iOS is surprisingly good, I feel pretty at home on it, at least for basic scroll browsing
Thanks for suggesting mlem. Found the TestFlight and it’s so much better than the website. I’m also a former Apollo user so my expectations are through the roof.
Yeah it’s not gonna be easy, but honestly I do see potential in mlem and I think with some basic additions, it can get itself closer to that Apollo experience. Which of course is what all apps should aspire to
It is a shame because there is so much knowledge on reddit that can be lost. Whenever I had a problem I would append reddit to my google search. Bug fixes for games, advice on purchases etc.
I know it’s kinda irreplaceable. I think I will stop mindless browsing Reddit but will still go there occasionally when I’m looking for specific advice.
This will be how I use it as well. Reddit usually tends to have the most concise, up-to-date answers for a lot of questions that I have about most my hobbies. Especially video games.
That will hopefully change, but it was such a good way to basically guarantee I found the information I actually wanted.
I’d be interested to know from someone more tech-savvy whether googling advice, and then clicking on the cached version, still counts as viewing reddit. Because I’d ideally still like to append reddit to my google searches without giving them ad views.
AKA if someone monetises advice given for free, we should be able to freely access it.
Fortunately they’ve already been utilized as the training data of a bunch of LLMs lol
Me too, it will be difficult to fix that fucking bug that just you and one lost redditor has experienced lol
Those were all the best groups. I’ve seen a few of knowledge-based reddits setting to read-only instead of private, so they’re still searchable.
perhaps some lunatic out there will try preserving some of that in the fediverse, although I guess it will be nigh impossible to separate the quality content from the mountains of shit
edit: of course they’re already on it: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiveteam_has_saved_over_108_billion_reddit/
ArchiveTeam has been archiving Reddit posts for a while now, but we are running out of time. So far, we have archived 10.81 billion links, with 150 million to go.
Recent news of the Reddit API cost changes will force many of the top 3rd party Reddit apps to shut down. This will not only affect how people use Reddit, but it will also cause issues with many subreddit moderation bots which rely on the API to function. Many subreddits have agreed to shut down for 48 hours on June 12th, while others will be gone indefinitely unless this issue is resolved. We are archiving Reddit posts so that in the event that the API cost change is never addressed, we can still access posts from those closed subreddits.Yeah I’ve seen that. My only hope is that it is easily searchable. Not much help for most for the data to be archived in a non-accessible format.
well maybe they could just put it on one read only lemmy instance, restrict access to anything that isn’t a crawler and let google/bing/duckduckgo solve that problem for us
I’ve already opened and quickly closed Apollo a dozen times today. Time to break the habit. Going to start reading instead of doom scrolling.
For me, once Apollo officially stops working I won’t have any ingrained habit for reaching out to reddit. I stopped using the website years ago except for reading search results that point there.
I was trying to describe a former subreddit on a thread here and just habitually looked for its subreddit description and then remembered it was dark and that’s why I was on lemmy in the first place.
What I find frustrating is that on iOS, the system put my Ice (Mastodon) icon into a Social folder but my Narwhal app was placed in Information and Reading! So my muscle memory has me tapping an icon in a different folder and I can’t move Ice to where I want it. I’m trying to train myself to use the PWA links on my Home Screen for sh.itjust.works and kbin.social but it’s a struggle.
I disabled the Infinity app on my phone, so even if i click out of habit it stops me
this is already so much like reddit of old, im cool with it. if it comes up in a search thats fine, might port the data though!
I had to move Sync off the homepage of my phone to avoid the muscle memory of just clicking it mindlessly. I have caught myself once or twice wanting to type it into the URL.
I definitely had to move the icon…and so sad about Sync, it’s like an old friend.
Don’t delete it just yet, the app developer mentioned there is a chance he updates the API and app to work with Lemmy.
This is really great to hear! If I can keep using Sync honestly a big part of what I’ll miss about Reddit will disappear
Exactly what I did. I put Lemmy in it’s place
yea me too, lol. i just put jerboa in the same spot I had sync to use my muscle memory for good
Haha, I did the same. Put Mlem in place of Apollo
All the users scrubbing their comments from reddit with protest messages are doing gods work in making people more upset with reddit over this. Long live the fediverse now I guess.
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Same here. It was equal parts freeing and uncomfortable. Recommend https://redact.dev/ for anyone looking to do the same.
My reddit account never posted a lot but out of principle I am planning on deleting my account, if they do reverse the changes before the 30th.
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I never knew any component of Reddit was ever open-source? But yeah, that AMA was so bleak. I’m enjoying Lemmy a lot right now, so maybe I can do without Reddit.
It’s just that Reddit has been like my one cultural constant in the last decade. I have ADHD, so I tend to go through phases of things but the sheer diversity of Reddit and all the years of history of the site meant that it’s been a really big part of my life. I know that’s probably similar for a lot of other folks.
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@WatTyler @Sailor_jets #Reddit used to be #FOSS years ago, and there’s an archived version of their code here:
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
IDK if anybody’s actually using it to host a forum site though.
Wow, I legit never knew. Thanks for the link, that’s really interesting.
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I had to remove my reddit bookmark to break the habit today. Its been… rough… I keep opening my email instead.
Apparently I visited reddit 18000 times this browser install.
13993 times for me… I never even had a bookmark for Reddit.
What’s worse is that I tend to just keep the tabs open I frequent indefinitely and this current browser instance of Firefox is at the most 5 months old since it’s a new laptop, and I primarily used RIF on my phone… So 13993 is a stupidly low number compared to how much time I actually spent on Reddit.
Looking at those numbers it hard to say that it wasn’t a terrible addiction.
