1y ago

Thank you Steve Huffman for curing my reddit addiction!

I stopped using reddit when Apollo went down, and 2-3 hours of scrolling and active posting in some niche subs turned into ~30 mins of Lemmy per day, which I find much more healthy.

I didn’t start doing yoga, painting, or a side business, just feel much better having cut back the last big pillar of my social media addiction.

So thanks Steve!

(If it’s not too much to ask, please take a look at how you could improve instagram, you could save another 15 minute of my day)

51 comments

I agree! I've been wasting time on reddit since 2008 or so, to the point that now and then I'd block it on my router to avoid going there from habit. Not all bad of course, but it's been increasingly futile and counterproductive in the past few years.
I've never used third party apps, but I stopped going there when it became clear the management has zero respect for the userbase.
- The thing is, literally all big tech companies also have zero respect for their userbase but people keep using Google, Meta, Insta and all those things.
  I think us geeks have started to move away from it more and more, but the majority couldn't care less.
  
  I gave up on facebook, twitter and instagram years ago, but just because I did of course doesn't mean everyone else did. I ended up replacing them with nothing... more reddit, I suppose, but it doesn't fulfill the precise same purposes.
  It's heartening that finally significant amounts of people are moving to alternatives because the alternatives do exist now. When people were ticked off with reddit in the past, your choice was pretty much... fuck off, i guess. Same for Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and IG. At least there are good alternatives to Twitter and Reddit now. They don't need to be huge, merely big enough.
  
  At a certain point you just have to keep doing what you’re doing and hope people join you. :/
  There are so many scary topics today that “hey this is really important to get right” just doesn’t really hit bottom unless someone already cares about a particular issue, and we all know how incentivized those big platforms are to providing actual critiques of their products.
  I’ve settled on just telling people what I use and why, and sometimes they look thoughtful, and I do what I can with my own limited knowledge and time. More a minimization of harm than going for broke.

While Lemmy is significantly less engaging, it is a lot better at that. I'm glad, especially knowing the algorithm isn't run by some money hungry people.

Reddit saved my life through making the service literally unusable. I was finally able to break an over decade long addiction to the service. Doc said if I had continued, the cancer would spread through the computer into me.

Curing instagram addiction is easy. Just unfollow everyone you don’t know in person. Cut my instagram time from ~2h/day to 5 minutes every other day

I also don't have reddit addiction syndrome anymore.
Now I have Lemmy Addiction Syndrome...
- It's called Fediverse Addiction Syndrome
  
  Nah, only Lemmy. I don't like the Mastodon system where you follow users instead of communities. Like why would I want to follow some random internet strangers I don't know, instead of an actual community of people with similar interests to have a meaningful discussion with? Any Twitter-like system where you follow users is just not my type of platform to use.
  Much easier to search for "Technology" and have a full community instead of finding a Mastodon User equivalent of LinusTechTips, which is just one person. I'd have to search for every tech person to get all the tech stuff. I prefer just one community for everything.
- I’m glad I’m not the only one, lol. I’m just sitting here like, “I think my addictive behavior is coming from the inside, because if I get the same kind of stimulus, I have the same response…”
  But, on the plus side, Lemmy is doing a much better job of delivering dopamine hits than Reddit was. Reddit is like the dealer who gives you good stuff at first, then starts cutting it with something else, raising the price, refusing to answer the phone for a month while you’re having withdrawals, and generally making your life miserable for no good reason.
  
  I read something that that's exactly what they do, you can't be consistent or it won't work. It has to be given, taken away, given in small amounts, etc.
- Same, lol

Same here! Since I quit Reddit, I've lost 120 lbs, gotten promoted, and learned to play the piano!

I started reading books much more. I'm glad about that.
- Continue on doing that.
  
  I will. I got all these library apps on my phone so I go to those instead of social apps. Or I do surveys for money; I've made a lot of cash that way! Something productive feels better.

For real. I miss the old Reddit. I recently took a digital walk down memory lane and found my first reddit link from 2007!
Good times. I miss Aaron Swartz too. Knowledge is power and he sacrificed himself for freeing knowledge.
Reddit to me is the digital Kowloon Walled City. Crazy place where you can find anything but also needs to be demolished.
- Same, I miss old Reddit too

There’s Pixelfed, something of a fediverse Instagram. In many ways it’s actually better, even. But it’s pretty mature at this point and has a bunch of QoL stuff going on, such as mastodon signup/login thing.
Unfortunately I think ig crowd is much less likely to move on to fediverse alternatives than Twitter or reddit folks.
Hard to just quit ig for me too, when I have brand accounts to keep up and active, and it’s also actually the last social media I have family members and relatives on, and only thing allowing me to move would be for them to join fediverse somewhere, not necessarily pixelfed, but thats unlikely to happen very soon.
- actually the last social media I have family members and relatives
  The reason I quit Facebook was because of my relatives. They post bullshit conservative posts and stuffs and share it. Was fed up of seeing it on a daily basis. The moment these people enter Instagram I will be gone from it for good.
- I hate what Instagram has become lately. First it became a Snapchat clone, and then it transformed into a TikTok clone. I preferred it when it was just a photo album.
  But hard to quit when everybody use it.

Don't worry. As this site grows more and more contents are coming you will be back to normal. You will be watching yourself scrolling for hours.
- I guess you're right. Especially with stimulating, retro looking stuff like old.lemmy.world

The people here seem much nicer...for the moment.
- There was more shitty behavior than normal for a bit, but it's really calming down again. The vibe here is much more relaxed and accepting.

Cheers Steve!
Same here, I've found myself being more productive and having more time. It's also a refreshing experience to be part of an early platform again and seeing it progress.

Agreed. I also downloaded a rss reader and am doing better about actually reading articles instead of going to comments to get the synopsis.
- Which RSS reader do you like?
  
  I’m on iOS and purchased Reeder. Some of the other apps have some nice features from what I read, I just didn’t want to pay a monthly subscription for an RSS feed.
  Reeder has been great so far and I like that it has the ability to follow mastodon users and YouTube channels built in. The twitter integration is broken for obvious reasons, but I’m fine with that.

only good thing to come out of this tbh

It bothers me when people think of social network use as addiction. If you went to a bar, restaurant, work or school you wouldn't see it as an addiction. I think that seeing social media as addictive is especially harmful when Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok use it to do immoral things. They hide behind the "but they're addicts anyway, so what does it matter?" Social networks are not addictive. They're compelling.
Does this mean that married people are addicts, to each other? Think the absurdity of calling social media addictive. It devalues our online communities to use such words.
- That's like saying playing video games for 10 hours every day isn't a sign of addiction because it devalues the gaming hobby.
  Social Media addiction is a real thing. Every single popular social media app is designed to draw people in and keep them using it. The "drag down to refresh" is literally copied from slot machines.
  
  This. Social media can be used in a healthy way, but that doesn’t mean social media addiction doesn’t exist.
- TBH: If you really are spending a lot of time in bars, several hours a day, you also have to face some ugly truths about addiction. And there are also people addicted to work.
- They are addictive by design. They’re very much like slot machines in casinos. They want to take as much of your attention as they can to make profit.
- Something becomes an addiction when you persist in doing it even though you know it's not doing you good or even actively causing you harm. By that definition, excessive internet use IS an addiction, because many people will endlessly doom-scroll their favourite sites even though they know there are more important things they should or could be doing.
- Does this mean that married people are addicts
  Codependent relationships can be classified as addictions

51 comments