This is sort of a follow up post to Digital Detox and Self Care. It is currently 12:00AM and it has become another rant about the modern internet. Read at your own will
The Situation
A site that was once designed to be a link aggregator, a format that’s no longer compatible with mainstream social media, has become a weird blend of infinite feeds full of reposts, AI slop, ragebait, bots and discussion boards.
Basically: You aren’t missing much. If it’s important, there’s probably a discussion elsewhere on the internet about it.
“Most people don’t know why they’re on TikTok”
- A friend (2026). I think the same applies to r/popular.
In my previous post on this I said I created an account so I wasn’t draining my energy on all sorts of slop and instead used it to look at things from specific Subreddits. I have logged out of that account.
A Different Experience
It’s hard to explain what I thought of using a Reddit account because I didn’t experiment as much as I wanted to. I didn’t join any specific subreddits or use the custom feeds, admittedly this is probably what I wanted this entire time.
Nonetheless, I still noticed some differences to not having an account. The home page could change very quickly based on the subreddits I visited. For example, visiting photography related ones meant it seemed to forget everything about Godot. All while it was probably colleting even more data.
If you are wondering about adverts: I didn’t see any because I have been using an ad blocker for the past ten years. But I did turn uBlock Origin off once to see, and you could’ve guessed that it made the site unusable. While I think all forms of online advertising are equally hostile, Reddit’s adverts are mixed directly into the feed, which is a tiny step up from e.g. a newspaper site, but still makes it a hundred times worse.
Bots Ruin Everything
Bots generating rubbish, bots posting rubbish over and over again, bots arguing with you, bots roasting the planet.
Ok, not everyone on Reddit is fake, but if you just stop for a moment, take a breath and think what it is you’re viewing, it’s apparent that it’s meaningless, artificial junk which doesn’t matter in 5 minutes’ time.
My favourite Reddit posts include:
My employer hates me, employers hate us. Here’s why posting this will fix everything
You’ve seen this video twice already, but we’ll show you it again, because it’s definitely worth your time!
Here’s a question from a chatbot to r/AskReddit. Chatbots can only come up with questions already asked before, but that doesn’t matter.
The Good(?)
In the last post I said that Reddit actually encourages discussion because of its threaded nature, except this has been hijacked by a profit making machine which is tuned to maximise some arbitrary internet throughput.
This is one of the few mainstream sites which is still left wing in some sort of capacity - ironically against the company’s own interests. If you said anything “bad” about ICE et al., some of your data might have been willingly handed over, depending on who you want to believe. Of course, data being handled haphazardly is a flaw on other sites too.
My Resolution
Reddit is designed to be a drain on my own energy. I have never installed TikTok or Instagram (and I am sort of proud of that), which may or may not have done wonders for my health, but there’s room for improvement. Therefore, I want to try and have nothing to do with Reddit.
I can’t tell how many people read these posts, outside of running grep on the nginx logs. But if anyone does, I hope they know someone else feels the same.