> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube
Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.
I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit
Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.
I have a predisposition for that, and Reddit is indeed poison for some of us. I blocked it with pihole, along with most other social media sites, years ago.
Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it.
And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone.
It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.
PiHole was my solution as well, and then Reddit decided to help. The "new" Reddit interface is still horrible and unusable, so old.reddit.com was always my go to. I don't have or want a Reddit account, I just wanted to follow a few sub-reddits. Now old.reddit.com is blocked for users without an account and they appear to be rolling out something similar to the site in general. You can see a few posts, and the a pop-up appears and requires you to sign in.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.
I'm a frequent Reddit user. Recently they have been bringing some of the more poisonous elements of social media over to their platform. Pushing a "for you" feed, and prioritizing a "Best" sorting algorithm over "new" or "hot".
Reddit is a site which I would only recommend to someone I truly hated. It's poison on every level imaginable, more so than basically any other social media I've ever used.
People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.
Reddit sucks so much if you use the defaults or follow any remotely "controversial" subreddit. If you follow subreddits for your hobbies and so on it's generally okay, I have no issues with the various Warhammer subreddits I follow...
And it doesn't feel like poison. I haven't used Reddit in several years so I don't know how it is now, but I used to feel yucky if I visited Facebook or Instagram, but not Reddit.
I tried to use it a year ago just to see what it was really like.
It ended rather quickly with me staring at my own comment looking for ways to twist what I wrote into something ban worthy. Then it happened again! LOL!
1985 Johannes Paulus II visited the Netherlands and some comedians made a song about it that was on TV. The song text is roughly that he enjoys his job and that he has to visit NL.
The real offence is posting without being a bot. The subreddit has to look a certain way, idk what they have in mind but always something, they use bots to make it look that way, you can also post if you contribute to the project but if you ever go against their unstated wishes, then bam!
All of this existed before, all the way back to BBS culture (minus the bots mostly). What Reddit did was hyperscale it. People are tribal and they enforce adherence to their chosen tribe's ways. It's pretty depressing to look back and see that one of the quickest paths to three commas was to monetize it.
BBS people weren't conspiring to create the appearance that everyone on the BBS thinks a certain way and talks about certain topics. If an operator was doing that, he didn't need real accounts to fake posts.
It's one thing when randos on the internet choose to express something vile and stupid, it's an entirely different thing when people you know express something vile and stupid.
The problem with Reddit is that all the news subs and all the politics subs are just massive echo chambers and there is simply no way to interact with them unless you follow the agreed upon views espoused by the mods.
If you go on a conservative sub and say that you agree with 90% of what they offer but not the last 10%, you'll just be branded as a commie/socialist and the opposite is true on the left wing subs.
Nuanced comments are few and far between and the worst of all for me as someone living in Europe is /r/Europe which is very left-wing and honestly reminds me a cult of some sort. US bad, Europe great, left is good, right is bad. It is just insufferable.
I think on the contrary X/Twitter is more balanced as I can choose to follow different people on opposite sides of the aisle without fearing getting banned when I comment on some of their posts with views that may not be shared by the original poster.
> When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media.
It can be, but it can also (still) be sanitized.
I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible.
There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.
My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. It’s hard giving up those sites, not because that’s where the people are but because we are all addicted to them. If you switch to mastodon or pixelfed, you’ll find good stuff there, but you won’t engage with it as much because it’s not algo driven, which to me is a win.
> My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad.
I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me.
The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad).
A time posted sort is an algorithm too. But that's obviously not what's meant here even if the "gotcha" is there for that too. It's the combination of profitability motivations and manipulation of dopamine responses that are the outcomes people object to.
With an open API, there are IMO paths to an LLM* cultivating one's algorithmic feeds to only show you what you actually want to see as opposed to engaging you by enraging you, but without regulation, the social media companies will block that by any means necessary.
And then, even if you did achieve a truly personalized feed, there will be accusations you're limiting your worldview to a filter bubble**. And sure, you are. Still beats algorithmic rage-baiting. It's up to you to figure out how much you wish to engage IMO, not some tech company or virtue signaling concern troll influencer.
ATM the killer product would be a "bring your own algo" message board/socio thing/infinite scroll endorphin generator/etc
I run a simple badword filter on my rss aggregator and it already outperforms anything big tech can come up with by a very large margin.
Back when advertisements weren't 40 minute long I one time fell asleep while watching youtube on auto play. It was already very horny for Donald Trump as the US election was coming up but after watching a few of those the algo became convinced I wanted to watch nothing else. When I woke up ~8 hours later it had filled the entire front page and all side bar video suggestions with the face of that unbearable retard. I'm convinced this is how youtube changes all of us into ufologists.
After this came a period where I more-carefully picked the videos I watched. Before I would watch anything that spiked my curiosity. This changed into "Do I want this in my feed for the next 3 weeks?". I just looked for an example and my feed has a bitcoin video. I've been waiting for those to go away for 15 years. I don't question someone is interested in those.
My own word filter is like, go ahead, say it once, say the word, say bitcoin one time, try me. Oddly, if an article consistently calls it BC without explaining what it refers to it might actually be worth reading.
I suggest someone creates something like an app store or extension platform where the user can pick or buy their own algorithms each with their own exotic brand of configuration screen.
You could entirely create one that costs thousands per month to run and is actually worth it. Have it take in my browser history, my investment portfolio, the books I own, the conversations my phone listened in on, check my agenda how much time I have for doomscrolling and my activity for how much time I actually sink into it. Dump a bunch of llm tokens into the task. Run some complicated prompts.
yes, the fundamental BS assumption of algorithmic social media is that human desire and curiosity is legible, and can be calculated in a straightforward way.
X is honestly among the worst of the worst. People give purposefully bad takes just for the engagement and it's overall super toxic
Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind
YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life
I'm mostly passive on reddit these days but really struggle to leave it as I do enjoy seeing things like cool projects people are making on /r/selfhosting and such. Every time I think of leaving it I just think well I cant because where will i find out about cool new projects now.
I know it’s not the same but I watch stuff like hackaday and others with an rss reader, now. Old school approach. It helps jail the types of content I passively consume. I blocked reddit and most other social media with the pihole I was using anyway.
After having been away from Reddit for a couple years now, I think it was a good trade. But obviously that’s a very personal thing.
LinkedIn is up there too, the reality distortion and appearance of everyone being a self made trillionaire can make the strongest of minds feel like they’re utter failures. It’s of course not true and 90% seem to be pure bullshit, but who has time to investigate ever thought leader post they get shoved in their face
I’m on X for tech interest, new hardware, robotics, coding. If X didn’t allow blocking words/phrases, I could not use it! And yes, my blocklist is huge..
Not just the hivemind, Reddit has been thoroughly astroturfed for a long time now. The vast majority of large subreddits have at least 1-2 mods who stifle/amplify discourse in the service of companies, think tanks, and certain Levantine pariah nations.
Subs with names like /r/wowlookatthis are posting blatant "west bad" propaganda. Making USA and EU people feel bad.
Yet I walk outside in Sweden and I'm in one of the best functioning and beautiful nations in the world. Yet Swedish Reddit will post "west bad" propaganda on how everything is right wing doom. I mean from their perspective, sure... but so so so wrong they are. I just hope they get some refugees in their houses.
I have some curated subreddits I use for work related stuff. For politics it is suffering. Now watch the left think it is due to right wing dominance. Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy.
Is the topic of Israel and Palestine truly that decisive across some binary party lines? I know people with a wide range of opinions both sides. I feel like it's more loud social media echo chambers than some sort of political schism.
I understand, but I don't agree the with GP's implication. I don't truly believe the opinions on Israel is enough to categorize one sub as being left or right wing. It's a delicate and highly debated topic, hence why I would consider Worldnews to be an echo chamber, at least on that particular topic.
Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.
I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit
Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.