Reddit isn't worth hours every week. You are not getting that time back. It isn't quality time spent on things that enrich you. You have to care for yourself and be more picky about what you spend your time and attention on.
Quitting stuff is good for you.
Except if you're drunk and lonely, and all the bars are closed. Then it's a real problem.
The real nasty thing is, so many people are living in a world now where they act like there's nothing better to do on the train, when there are people all around us we should be paying attention to and interacting with.
Sure, I can look up recipes pretty much anywhere on the internet, but the community for cooking tips has been awesome. (Simple example: "you should add nutmeg to make alfredo sauce taste better")
But it also has great hobbyist communities. r/functionalprint and r/fixmyprint are amazing for 3d printer enthusiasts, for example.
It's a bit like criticizing the library for stocking copies of MAD magazines.
I'm interested by the direction Lemmy (or a similar system) might take. At the moment it's a Reddit-lite clone, which is completely reasonable because that's what people are looking for. But maybe with a different set of incentives (presumably more user-centric), over time it might morph into something different?
What they've been missing for an age is an equivalent to Twitter's retweets. Retweets deliver you straight to the door of content providers via the people you already follow. You can start with Brian Cox and NDT as signup recommends, and make your way to your preferred scientific niches pretty quickly.
Reddit has crossposts that barely scratch the surface and often make the source sub almost invisible.
About 3-4 days out of the week we only watch the news broadcast, and then spend time downstairs in our hobby spaces. I build electronics, 3D print stuff, program etc, and my wife does various textile projects. Some days we spend a good 4-5 hours just making stuff. Or we go for bike rides.
In fact, the only reason we still have basic TV service is because my wife likes to watch baking and sewing shows live (as they air for the first time). (Can't remember the name of these shows ... "Great British Bake-off"?). About once or twice per year I try watching movies on regular cable TV (well, IP based "cable") and I find the experience really annoying with all the commercial breaks.
Spending less time just mindlessly scrolling through reddit or low quality "news" sources also means I have more time to read books. I don't think I've read this many books per year since I was in my 20s.
I find the things that I've replaced Reddit (and other things) with far more enriching and fun. I regret not being more selective about what I spend my time on in the past. I've wasted a lot of time on things I didn't enjoy all that much.
Personally, I need some time each day to relax, which involves passive content consumption. Between watching TV, reading the news, or reading Reddit, I would argue that Reddit is the "least bad" option.
You're right that I'm not getting that time back, but it's not time I would have used productively anyway, and at least I'm learning something.
"Passive content consumption" is a very recent phenomenon which doesn't allow our brains to relax and process information. It merely maintains the state of over-stimulation.
You need it a lot less than you think! Go and do something else, like stare out of your window, or sharpen your kitchen knives, or fix your todo list.
I found the same issue myself, so I deleted my Reddit account a few years ago. Nowadays, I don't check any online newspapers and get my world news from the Reuters website.
When I look at the traffic even from Hacker News you can kind of tell that most people who click on links even here, just spend a few seconds looking at your content and then disengage. Especially if you don't provide people with lots of pictures and "hooks" that allow people to engage more in some way. Give people a wall of text and they'll barely skim what you write.
It’s only when the app isn’t there that your brain snaps out of it and you wonder what the hell you’re doing.
Staying away from Reddit hasn't been too hard but it gets new stuff faster than the newspapers or other media sites I regularly go to. This forces me to slow down and read the other sites' articles more thoroughly which is probably good.
Luckily I don't use reddit from my laptop, due to to horrible experience. So no muscle memory to trick me into visiting.
set your browser to delete cookies on exit, and restart it often enough. If anything can be access with a browser, don't install 'apps'
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.jerboa/ [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jerboa&hl=...
> Do you know a good dealer?
Staying on the platform just prolongs the addiction and replacing it with another social network is not the solution.
I blew that time today on browsing through a Lemmy node, but for the next two days I'm going to focus that time elsewhere... maybe I'll make fresh pasta.
there's significantly less politics, I discovered some cool new subreddits due to so many of the biggest communities being closed, threads were pleasantly concise, and I just felt like it was a much more mentally healthy scrolling experience.
it's too bad that this is all going to end in a couple days and it'll be back to normal except without rif.
I deleted my account and removed it from Firefox's quick link. I also uninstalled Instagram and Facebook to not replace it with mindless scrolling.
And here I am, visiting other pages a bit too much.
I guess it'll take some time to disconnect completely from it and replace it with something useful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36262192
And follow this up to say that in the days after that, I was subjected to a vast array of hate and abuse, including things like "groomers should die", etc. when I wasn't even beginning to an express a political opinion about what Target sells or who should sell what bathing suit, or anything like that.
I was super happy to see the (stupid, pointless, pathetically idiotic) "strike" go into effect the next day, because my fondest wish would be for that entire ecosystem to fall over and choke on its own vomit.
