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.
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.
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.
Jup, legal eagle fan here (:
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
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.
It helps that if something is wrong on Reddit, another redditor usually points it out since there are many eyes on any particular thread.
Yes, I always enjoyed getting down voted for the correct answer.
True, but the chance of it being wrong is substantially smaller than the chance of chatGTP dreaming up something.
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, isn’t kept up to date so doesn’t make sense to repost, 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
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.
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 long for a day where my search queries will end in Lemmy instead of Reddit.
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.
Personally it feels like working for free by posting on Reddit. Id rather create content about my hobbies here where no one is making money off of it.
I’m using a pi-hole on my network and I added reddit to the ‘blocked list’ to cut down on myself clicking the links. I should find a way to filter out the links from my search results easily, but this works for now.
I feel like we need a Redditor’s Anonymous community lol.
Hi I’m Swintoodles and I’ve tried to open reddit 3 times this morning. The site is sparse, so I only browsed for 20 minutes, but I know I can get better!
I have set a 0 minute timer on Boost and Infinity, so I can’t navigate to reddit. On the first day of blackout I had to open reddit to try and find the name for lemmy, squabbles and raddle so I had some alternatives as I couldn’t remember them!
I have opened and closed youtube way too many times. It’s been tough. I even went to 4chan after many year last night. A real blast from the past.
Full relapse yesterday.
I’m hoping to do better today.
We so need a RedditsAnonymous!
-edit- I said on the first day I went to reddit… but it’s only been one day!! wow. that’s embarrassing lol
It’s going to take time to reposition, but for the long haul this is the best course of action, personally I’ve uninstalled and blocked - but I do miss some of the subreddits from before.
This community seems to be in its early steps, so every contribution means progress, and sooner rather than later we’ll be back to where we want to be!
Fr, it is very hard to break. I instinctively add “reddit” to the end of every search.
This speaks to how bad Google has gotten IMO - I do it too.
Yup
I know, it’s so much harder to find answers to anything past very simple answers with Google these days. After the blackout, I’ll probably do far less jumping straight to Reddit, but I feel like it’s still going to be unavoidable sometimes.
After the subreddits go un-dark I will probably still use this for searching until there’s a LLM set-up to “replace” google searching (which Bing is Still Not, imo).
Agreed, I use reddit for a lot of my research be it for purchasing decisions or other random questions I think of during the day.
Unrelated but we have similar usernames :)
Hahaha that is amazing! I was going to go for my cryptic variation of ‘1bluxjay’ only to realize that I can have the actual username. Been a long time since I’ve been able to do that.
Yeah, even if I quit using reddit as a community tool the information value is huge. When something breaks on a niche subject they can be the only easy to find source.
It doesn’t help the fact that depending of the question, every single answer ends up being only on reddit and nowhere else.
This is one of the problems for me. I frequently search tech issues and more often than not, a lot of links are from Reddit.
Really specific issues are more often than not only found in reddit, and that’s not even all, for me at least; a lot of those answers in reddit are short and to the point. Sometimes you search for the solution of a problem and find posts on websites filled with irrelevant information that you don’t really have the time/patience to read. . .
Agree. Here’s hoping that eventually we shall see the same amount and quality of information in the fediverse.
I have this problem because Google hasn’t been as good the past few years unless I append “reddit” to my search. During all of this going on, I’ve been trying to be diligent about viewing the cached version instead, but it’s not always available.
Quitting Reddit’s hard, but it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here! I’ve got to admit, even after Mastadons limited success, before today I never seriously thought that federated social media would actually ever work. It just seemed to complicated for average person to grok.
Here we all are though! Decentralizing the decision making for who gets to post and host, what gets seen and what doesn’t, seems to be worth fighting for. For enough of us at least to make this corner of the internet interesting for a while.
I’ve got a question though, are there any non technical people here? If you are interested in technology do you know non technical people who are participating in the black out?
I think a Reddit type platform lends itself better to federation than something like Twitter. Reddit is already split up into sub communities so it’s easier to digest vs. Mastadon/Twitter meant to be one big conversation.
Your question about non-technical savoy folks being on here is valid and there’s probably not many. But Reddit also started out like that and it took many years before it became mainstream. Federated serves are a new thing, even for the technological literate, so I suspect it will take a while to permeate into casual internet users but it will happen in the future.
Yeah I can see a path for this ramping up slowly, especially given the horrible mismanagement of places like Reddit. Even if they weather the storm of the blackout, given the official app, it seems like they’re just chasing the same infinite dumb stream of memes design that places like Facebook and Tiktok have already embraced. Probably because that’s where the money is? I don’t know.
The more niche communities are always what made me hang out at Reddit though! I’d bet they continue to alienate and marginalize them enough that more people continually jump ship over the next couple of years. I do hope Beehaw and other spaces like it succeed in becoming a non-profit and truly community driven, and the web decentralizes itself again.
Yep, same thing happened to me. Tried to figure out what the Fragile modifier does in Trackmania but I couldn’t find the answer anywhere. /r/trackmania is shutdown (based) and i literally couldn’t find the answer anywhere. I still don’t even know what it does…
It allows your car to become damaged if you hit a surface too hard. Being damaged will screw up your steering.
Finally, closure. Thanks a bunch lol.
Damn love this place already
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 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.
Idk how helpful this is, but LibRedirect basically redirects all reddit links (and other websites like youtube, twitter, tiktok) in your browser to a privacy front-end that doesn’t do any tracking or ads or things like that which is better than using the official reddit site.
Redirector is another option for this. It’s a generic tool so it doesn’t have baked in rules, you have to specify your own. I use
^https://(old\\.|www\\.)?reddit.com/r/(.*)for the source pattern andhttps://your-favorite-libreddit-instance/r/$2as the destination.
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.
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
I’m the same. I’m used to adding “site:reddit.com” to my searches to ensure that I get actual answers as opposed to those crappy blogs with 5 screens of nonsense and tons of blank space (supposed to be filled with ads!). Not to mention all the obscure problems that those blog owners haven’t monetised.
SAME I literally googled “How to watch… …Reddit” and instinctively clicked a link, luckily the sub was down but still.
I keep opening Relay today and immediately quitting. Anyone use an app for this? Maybe just need to replace the app location with a new app.
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I deleted the RIF icon from my main phone screen so I wouldn’t instinctively click on it. That void feels real weird.
I deleted RIF from its spot after 11 years and put Jerboa in the spot. Those are big shoes to fill.
I made a folder with reddit and Mlem, the Apple Lemmy client, so everytime I want to use reddit I click on the folder and see Lemmy as an alternative.
That’s exactly what I did. I moved my reddit app elsewhere and put Jerboa in its place. Now when I instinctually click, I get confused for a minute as I look at Lemmy and then sigh in relief and start browsing lol. Brains take so much work to adjust to change.
My browser has an option to turn sites into a progressive web app, so I have been using those for fediverse sites and put them where RIF used to be on my home screen.
Yeah I replaced the Relay icon with Jerboa.
I’ve never been a huge fan of reddit as a source of good information. I have expertise in a couple of areas (doctorate in one) and every time I saw an answer to a question that fell in my wheelhouse, it was quite possibly the wrongest answer possible and upvoted to the top. Always made me suspicious of the info I was getting in subreddits where I don’t know shit.
yeah… there are a few places where reddit is really good though, like troubleshooting advice for computers and code. probably has to do with attracting a sizable chunk of those communities.
some incorrect answers get upvotes ironically, often when the correct answer seems obvious. but I guess it depends on the type of question, and the sub
What’s weird is that I never used Reddit as much as I use Lemmy over last few days 😅
I’m not quite sure why, but Lemmy has the same effect on me.
I was pretty active on Reddit, but Lemmy feels different somehow. I genuinely want to engage multiple communities and post way more often.
I feel you. I try to make a point of commenting even though before I probably wouldn’t. I think Lemmy can really work, but we need to put in the effort.
The community is young so it feels good to add to it and make it bigger.
I’m having the opposite experience. I feel like it’s already so active here I can’t keep up in bigger communities like this one.
