As I participate in the boycott today and going forward, the biggest thing I’ve found I’m going to miss is the availability of discussion on topics. Obviously Reddit was never a bastion of truth and fact, but being able to find a discussion on a topic I was researching was always nice. For example today I was looking around for a fightstick / looking to see if one would be worth it for my use case, and Reddit was always the first result. What is everyone else unexpectedly missing from Reddit today?
Mostly this. I habitually add “site:reddit.com” to like anything if all I’m getting is bullshit generic articles. I keep getting forcefully reminded that every sub worth visiting is boycotting today. Hopefully that’ll help me break the habit lol
The place was curated. That’s the reason spez claims it was being scrapped by AI models.
I have already tried doing this a few times, even replacing Reddit with Lemmy, despite knowing what the result would be. It’s a fun exercise until I need to sit and read through the fluff in standard articles.
Biggest habit I’m going to have to break when I’m searching for stuff online now as well, trying to search through the bs articles and avoid Reddit has become quite the task
Realizing that almost every single weird thought or idea I’ve ever had was had by so many other people was kind of reassuring. That and the super informed people who were experts on literally anything you could ask(most of the time).
And the inside jokes and reddit celebs like shittymorph and shittywatercolour.That and the super informed people who were experts on literally anything you could ask(most of the time)
I’m going to let you in on a secret: what was actually happening most of the time was that random pontificating dicks would authoritatively make shit up on topics they read about once. It became easier to tell if you spent time with subjects you knew a lot about. It reminded me of this, where Michael Crichton was talking about his friend Murray Gell-Mann and a trend they had both noticed in newspapers:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
I think the only thing I will miss is exactly this. Being as enormous as Reddit is, any tiny niche thing would be, although tiny compared to the total userbase, gigantic compared to what any other site could provide. That’s 100% of what I will miss. I don’t think I will miss anything else.
Taking that into account, I realized there are other sites I can access these niches. And I realized that, knowing this, I have nothing else tying me there except the “ease” with which I will find this stuff. And even then, social media is changing. I can find info on stuff like this on Discord and other such places. Even Reddit can be way slower than many of the modern tools we have.
r/personalFinance was helpful, if not repetitive at times, but there were so many people posting. There was always at least a few decent posts with different opinions. I’m surprised I haven’t come across a replacement here yet.
lmao i will miss seeing “7k in CC debt, should I take out a personal loan at 29.99 interest rate?” 5 times a day
Me too. You can find nearly everything in reddit however obscure it is. Reddit is also a great place for finding answers ever since most websites became seo-optimized ai-generated content, making googling pretty much useless unless you add reddit to the query.
Yup. So many niche fixes to niche problems from some guy named Buttturdmomlover in 2011. Kinda sad.
One of my favorite things was scrolling CreepyAskReddit before bed because I’m a spooky fiend like that. I’ll miss it.
Browsing NoSleep was a common pre bedtime pastime of mine, while not super common, the good stories on there were really good
Hoping I won’t miss the compulsive refreshing and scrolling that comes with reddit use… Trying to go back to my old forums account instead but it’s really hard not to pop over to reddit to see what’s at the top of /r/all.
Hard same. Reddit had so much for my more niche interests. (Rock tumbling and Bravo TV before anyone gets any ideas 🤣)
And the amount of cat subs as well. Earplane ears, one orange braincell, illegally smol cats and etc.
Wait what part of reddit was “easy”?
