I stopped using Reddit regularly after the APIcalypse, even though I had never used any Reddit apps (I only used it on a web browser on a desktop). I still have an account that’s active there where I’ve only been using it to help and encourage people to move from Reddit to Lemmy and from Xitter to Mastodon.

I thought it was going to be harder than it actually was to abandon the many niche subreddits I was subscribed to there, but I just found other things to read. I will still occasionally visit Reddit, especially when it turns up on a search result with info I’m looking for, but to use it like that I don’t have to even have an account.

I plan to eventually delete or scramble all my posting history from there on all my accounts, but just haven’t had time to do it yet. I also haven’t found a way to do what I really want, which is to replace my comments with different random text for each message, to mess as much as possible with any LLMs. In no way will I contribute any more of my comments to Reddit, except for what I said in the beginning, to help people move here, and even that I will probably delete/scramble.

Hell, I miss LiveJournal more than I miss reddit. /old

Removed by mod

Leaving Reddit gave me the opposite of FOMO. I’m glad to not be fed as much algorithm-tailored BS as before. I still use YouTube, but most of my YouTube viewing is at least related to my other hobbies.

I nuked my accounts and I’m fully content with that. There’s no fomo, I haven’t even bothered to peek at how my old subs are doing.

I still use site:reddit.com when making searches, but that’s a different thing.

FOMO is a silly and manipulative phenomenon, I encourage you to try to figure out how you can break it. I left the day Apollo stopped working

I don’t have FOMO, I feel that there is enough for me to read here and I also use other platforms like https://news.ycombinator.com/ and Mastodon to get info about things which are not that popular here.

There are still things I use reddit for, but only because Google sucks so much now. Like if I’m looking for the best something to buy, I’ll add “reddit” at the end so I don’t get pages and pages of ads.

Otherwise, all my previously reddit-based entertainment comes from Lemmy, especially since all the activists seemed to have gone back. Lemmy is now fun again!

In many ways I was addicted to Reddit. I spent a lot of time on there. I needed an excuse to go cold turkey. I will go occasionally for specific information, but I’ve completely moved my idle doomscrolling to lemmy instances. There’s less content so it takes less time, which is good in a way.

I’ve been using a Libreddit instance to look up stuff on reddit (no login, no interaction, no ads, it’s shared so even my browsing history is being obfuscated with other users)

The downside is that these instances are severely rate limited, so sometimes I have to wait a bit if it’s busy.

I feel more out of touch with current events that aren’t related to US politics and I have fewer memes to send in the group chat, but no FOMO. Combined with quitting Twitter, it’s been good for focusing more on myself. I think I watch YouTube more than I used to now though.

FOMO is a weird term to use here because it implies some anxiety that I could be seeing more stuff than I am.

I get bored sometimes. There isn’t enough content here to keep me super engaged, and interesting niche subs about certain small games and whatnot are missed. I end up swapping back and forth between my front page here and my youtube recs, willing something interesting to appear.

But I’m not feeling the slightest anxiety that I’m missing some stranger’s idea of wit on a site I don’t go to. There’s way too much internet for me to ever think I was seeing it all in the first place, so I’m more than fine with missing the latest lyric or pun comment chain or the hottest new AITA fiction.

I had fully left Reddit ever since the API changes but checked in very very rarely every now and then whenever I googled something and Reddit results were the only results actually answering my questions. I don’t really miss it, and I found that I do spend way less time scrolling mindlessly, so that helped.

What kind of killed me was my deleting my account. I had been starting up PowerDeleteSuite in the last couple of months to get rid of my comments and posts, but I didn’t leave my PC running for long enough to delete everything whenever I actually remember to start it up. Now, I finally deleted everything and deleted my account too. I wasn’t using the account at all, but it made really sad to see the account go for good this time. Similar feeling to when I deleted RIF off my phone.

It was a good run.

I’ve gone back there from time to time because there’s not the specialised subs here yet, or those that are don’t have the traffic.

What I’ve found on the main dubs I used to frequent is that they are full of reactionary comments that have no grasp of history, context or empathy.

The specialised subs, maybe were like this and I was just more tolerant to it, are full of low effort “please look at me doing absolutely fuck all in any way of producing meaningful content” posts.

There’s far too many to actually get to the content with effort so the signal to noise ratio is too low to fight off my general contempt of the place.

No FOMO, I was able to switch my addiction over to Lemmy. But I really miss the CFS/ME and Long Covid subs. There are some communities here, but they have almost no traffic. I am still subbed through lemmit.online, but I usually can’t be bothered to reply to something through reddit.

I bet others with niche subs have the same problem.