Long before the APIcalypse, I was thinking of quitting Reddit. Now that everything went downhill, that decision became super easy.
I wasn’t really getting that much benefit out of Reddit, so it wasn’t a big deal. Spending time there was more like bad habit to me. The mere thought of paying for a bad habit sounds so absurd that quitting would have been absolutely mandatory at that point.
Fortunately though, Reddit already made the process so much easier simply buy kicking out my favorite client app.
Same here, it had been several months where I felt that the general quality had been declining. As soon as the AMA was done and nothing was answered I deleted the app (RiF).
Sadly I still miss some niche communities, but I've been finding substitutes
I know, right? It was like a steady stream of assholes, habitual doom scrolling, and occasionally a few good topics or people chatting.
I made a pact to stop using Reddit as soon as Infinity stopped working for me. It worked for months, but when it stopped, I held myself to it. Not only did I deactivate my account, I used a service to overwrite all of my content, and also then delete it beforehand. My mental health has been recovering steadily ever since.
Even if I did get something positive out of it, I refuse to be part of an ecosystem run that treats it's users and volunteers with such open hostility. The whole saga with Spez lying and bullshitting to make other people look bad, and the pro-corporate bots that popped up from time to time turned me off it entirely. I miss it sometimes, but what's the point of having a sense of ethics or personal conviction if you shrug your shoulders and do what you want regardless of whether you know you should?
It's like someone claiming to be a vegetarian, but they eat meat whenever they feel like it because it tastes good.
When I joined Reddit I noticed that it’s too easy to end up doomscrolling and arguing with idiots. That’s why I stayed away from r/all and any sub that’s all about news and/politics. The only exception was r/europe, because I think it’s good to know something about the region that actually influences my life.
In order to avoid wasting time on stupid idiont nonsense, I focused on science and technology subs along with some very specific niche subs. That way Reddit was actually able to provide some benefit from time to time.
I made a Lemmy account before the Reddit Blackout, and I’ve been here ever since. After the blackout ended, I visited Reddit every week at first, but now it’s more like once a month at most. In order to make the transition faster, I unsubscribed from everything except all the protest, blackout, API etc. related subs. So if I go to Reddit now, I’ll just see people complaining about Reddit. If I go to r/all it’s about as useless as it was years ago, so there’s no reason to spend time in there.