I'm Leaving Reddit for Good and This Is Why

• Update 2024-05-26: Backlinks with my good bye postings and a HN discussion

With currently 1034 post karma points and 3841 comment karma points (whatever they may mean anyway) on my latest reddit account, I'm stopping contributing to https://reddit.com/

I mostly posted PIM-related stuff in following sub-reddits:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/orgmode/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/datacurator/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/graz/

Although I will miss the community, I won't miss the platform. And here is why.

I realized that reddit doesn't allow me to use it in my mobile browser years ago:

Recently, reddit somehow decided that people using Firefox like me aren't allowed to use reddit any more:

No, reddit, I'm certainly not lowering my privacy protection in order to use your buggy service. I'd rather stop contributing to your service for good.

Some might argue that there are third party apps that should provide me a decent interface to reddit. Maybe there have been good apps for that but due to recent policy changes by reddit, there aren't any left as it seems. Furthermore, I actually don't want to use such a locked-down service any more.

I've written this longer blog article and I even held a talk about it on multiple events. You can watch the linked video, if you prefer. This is very important and explains many issues related to platforms similar to reddit.

• Issue: No Backup, No Distribution
• Issue: User Interface Dictatorship
• Issue: Rule Monopoly and Subjective Censorship
• Issue: User Account Hurdle

After summarizing the issues, I also provide multiple things we should do instead.

• Alternative: NNTP
  • I would very much welcome a new rising of this proven technology as it is the only technical solution I currently see that ticks all of my boxes required for a decent social network for mid-size or longer articles and discussions on topics.
• Alternative: Private Blogs with Feeds
• Alternative: Mixed Approaches

I hope that I've convinced you to read the whole article: Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit, ...

There are more reasons why reddit is not a good platform. For example, according to Reuters and this German article, reddit is selling their user-generated data for 60 Million Dollar each year to Google. As a user, I'd like to have a choice if reddit is allowed to give away my contributions to dubious projects and earn lots of money. That's just one bad strategic decision in a longer list in my opinion.

I will soon remove my RSS/Atom feeds for said subreddits from my feed aggregator. That's how I was using reddit so far: subscribing to the feed and switching to the web interface in case a message seemed interesting. I'll post some good-bye-messages to some subreddits to let people know that they won't reach me any more on reddit. I could not locate a way to add a hint to my reddit profile.

My reddit account will not be deleted but I might change my decision once reddit management decides to mis-use my contributed texts. As with Twitter, I might also manually remove all of my postings.

As I don't see any alternative at the moment, I'm mostly stopping to contribute to any web-based service with two exceptions: I'll blog here on my web page and I'll continue to publish on Mastodon.

You can learn on that page how to use this blog in an efficient way using Atom/RSS feeds.

Search for @publicvoit@karl-voit.at in a Fediverse client and you'll find my Mastodon-Account.

After doing a quick search, the Usenet as I was using it, seems to be pretty dead: hardly any service provider (I need to check out paid services yet), outdated introductions/welcome/tutorial pages, no traffic in the groups I used to read and contribute to. I'm open for suggestions of service providers as well as Usenet groups that are appropriate replacements for the subreddits mentioned.

At the moment, Lemmy doesn't seem to offer as good features as my Usenet clients and the platform itself does come with some downsides mentioned in my article. If you do know other alternatives that do not come with the restrictions of my article on avoiding web forums, let me know.

Of course, I will continue to contribute in real-life conferences, barcamps, and more events of all sorts.

• 2024-05-26: my good bye postings:
  • r/emacs + shared post on r/orgmode
  • r/datacurator
  • r/tugraz (no one cared to comment or upvote)
  • r/graz (some particular rude comments)
• 2024-05-26: a HN discussion