Reddit habit is hard to break.

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

It’ll take time. I think eventually we’ll have enough knowledge on Reddit alternatives like Lemmy where we can add “lemmy” to our search strings instead of “reddit”.

Google has been pretty much useless lately because it just spits out this SEO spam (probably all written by LLMs, that's the only way to explain why it's never happened before but does happen now), so losing reddit as one of the best sources of non-AI-generated information would set us back a lot.

What we need is the current state of reddit, but frozen in time and just as searchable as reddit is right now. And since reddit won't want to lose SEO, they will be open to scraping.

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 spent some time on mastodon, squabbles, kbin and vlemmy today subscribing.. it helped seeing many of the same communities in them. I’m 60.. so I know younger minds are nimble enough to make themselves comfortable elsewhere.

What I’m interested in seeing is if others are committed and tenacious enough to stand their ground - outside of Reddit. One thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older.. things change, and sometimes fighting over turf leaves the winner a ruined playground with bad memories for everybody.

Muscle memory is also hard to break. I had to remove Apollo from my homescreen :D

We're all in rehab 😐

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.

It doesn't help the fact that depending of the question, every single answer ends up being only on reddit and nowhere else.

It is a shame because there is so much knowledge on reddit that can be lost. Whenever I had a problem I would append reddit to my google search. Bug fixes for games, advice on purchases etc.

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...

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.

Hmm, somebody should make a Lemmy instance that just has a copy of Reddit in it. Probably somewhere hard to sue.

I had to remove my reddit bookmark to break the habit today. Its been.. rough.. I keep opening my email instead.

Apparently I visited reddit 18000 times this browser install.

I was going to ask in a full post, but as a comment on this topic would be better: what kind of modifiers would we type in when we want to narrow a web search scope to the fediverse? Like, it's easy to just add 'reddit' to any query, that instantly cuts out all the BS. Hoping there's some magic keyword in the metadata in the ActivityPub guts.

Someone feel free to start a full post on this, if you figure it's warranted.

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.

Absolutely. When I was having my first coffee this morning, I tried to browse Reddit out of a habit. Luckily, Apollo reminded my with a banner that I shouldn't do this.

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?

Fr, it is very hard to break. I instinctively add "reddit" to the end of every search.

I kept googling questions and clicking on the reddit posts. Reddit seems to be the only place to get some real answers sometimes.

All the users scrubbing their comments from reddit with protest messages are doing gods work in making people more upset with reddit over this. Long live the fediverse now I guess.

every time I look at my phone I'm instinctively hitting the RIF app... this is gonna take a while to adapt to, but new communities are popping up all the time, new server instances appearing, and new users flooding in so perhaps we can continue to being unproductive procrastinators.

On the upside, I guess my productivity will go up by at least 5% for a few days.

You don't really have to quit cold turkey. When I stopped using Digg I'd go back now and then but Reddit had become my go to. I phased it out over a little less than a month.

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 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.

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.

So... exactly what other users submitting content had to do previously. Unless you just lurk and don't submit anything.

It's pretty painful, but I have to admit: I'm a lot more productive today at work

What's weird is that I never used Reddit as much as I use Lemmy over last few days 😅

I'm keeping reddark open on another monitor as a reminder to stay away

i removed my reddit bookmarks and added lemmy instead. now i instinctually come here instead.

yeah, it's very difficult. even in google searches, the links come up and I then realize how much I depend on reddit for google searches.

I've replaced Reddit Sync with Jerboa as a shortcut on my phone's homescreen. This helps quite a bit as I noticed I opened Reddit out of habit (which isn't great either)

Hahah, that exact thing happened to me, and I had to go through such tech article as well. Hopefully all the useful information from there gets preserved.

Yeah, it really sucks. Hopefully enough people move to something else that there's a viable alternative.

I'm committed to doing my part this month on Lemmy, but I'll need others to do the same or I'll probably end up going back to Reddit eventually.

So far I've seen good content here, so keep it up!

Reddit still has tons of useful content and I'm expecting to be clicking on it or some sort of archive in the future. I won't be active of the platform in any way but there's still value in the content they're now using as leverage.

I feel this, I was buying something this morning and I googled something about it and instinctively clicked on the reddit link that popped up. The subreddit was private because of the blackout. Gotta alter my research methodology!

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.

I simply replaced the Reddit Sync shortcut with Jerboa on my phone, works wonders for me :) just need to find a few good replacement communities

ChatGPT can be a handy way to get certain information as well.

Believe me, I know. I've tried and failed to quit at least 10 times now (everytime I come back it eventually just becomes a place for me to argue with strangers). I'm hoping my displeasure with their recent dealings will be enough to keep me off for good, and its definitely looking like Lemmy can fill the void (hopefully in a more healthy way).

But yeah I'm gonna miss using Reddit to answer all my Google questions, or to hear what people are saying about whatever new song I've discovered, even from its a tiny obscure band nobody's heard of. The scale and scope of Reddit was a huge part of it's value.

this is already so much like reddit of old, im cool with it. if it comes up in a search thats fine, might port the data though!

I'm considering filtering reddit out using Portmaster since I use Portmaster anyway.

I don't think finding stuff on reddit is that big of an issue. Don't contribute to it's behemoth of content and your habbits will naturally readjust 🙂

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.

I unfortunately had to use reddit to resolve an issue with angular 😭😭😭

Seriously! I ended up blocking reddit and its subdomains with my pihole so that I'd stop clicking on things from google searches.

I put reddit on my dns blocking list for now. Prevents accidental access. Replaced the buttons on my browser and phone with lemmy, since it's the thing i probably zombie-touch by habit.

Search results are so full of trash I had the habbit of adding reddit to the search

I setup TimeLimit to block the reddit apps for some time. I hope it can help you with the redde-addiction.

i have successfully made it a whole 12 hours without opening reddit. i've chewed a lot of gum and also been to the gym. i think i can do it.

It could help to add reddit.com to your hosts file or your ublock origin filter list.

What I find frustrating is that on iOS, the system put my Ice (Mastodon) icon into a Social folder but my Narwhal app was placed in Information and Reading! So my muscle memory has me tapping an icon in a different folder and I can't move Ice to where I want it. I'm trying to train myself to use the PWA links on my Home Screen for sh.itjust.works and kbin.social but it's a struggle.

Edit: just to be clear, I've never understood why Narwhal was put in the Information folder instead of Social.

I made sure to pause RIF so I don't just blindly click on it.

A suggestion I've seen is to add reddit.com to your ublock origin "my filters" page. It works great for me!

For me, once Apollo officially stops working I won't have any ingrained habit for reaching out to reddit. I stopped using the website years ago except for reading search results that point there.

If you don't run your own search (SearxNG) and dont use pihole, you can get the uBlacklist extension for chrome/firefox to blacklist Reddit in search results on Google/Bing/DDG/etc.

To deter myself further, I even went so far as to block any search results from Reddit in my SearxNG instance.

If anyone else is interested.

In settings.yml uncomment the following, they are commented out by default

enabled_plugins:

- 'Hostname replace' # see hostname_replace configuration below

hostname_replace:

Then add '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': false under hostname_replace, restart SearxNG and bobs your uncle.

Yep. Same here. I needed an answer about makemkv audio files. I instinctively clicked 3 different reddit links. Finally got my answer on some other random forum, but I feel like reddit would have been better 🙁

I’ve already opened and quickly closed Apollo a dozen times today. Time to break the habit. Going to start reading instead of doom scrolling.

Has anyone had any luck with using the wayback machine as an alternative? It may not work on more recent posts, but it should be a viable option for protesting subreddits and routing traffic away from Reddit.

I wonder how difficult it would be to make an extension that handled the redirection.

Anyone have a good regex to add to my pi-hole to block reddit?

I always first search for a thing, look through the first ~10 results, don't find what I'm looking for, then go back to the search bar and append "reddit" and usually find the info I need right away almost every time. Going to be hard to break that habit and come up with better ways to pinpoint what I need. Or maybe I'll move all my questions to chatgpt and do what it tells me to do 🤡

Worst has been today needed to find a guide for textbooks and all the great guides were on reddit (which again thats great but also god damn it). That and breaking auto habit of trying to open Infinity has been rough but maybe I'll just move that habit here.

There is a lot of helpful information there. I hope that some of that can stay as search indexing on archive sites is difficult.

All that said, I just deleted my accounts I had with them. If I use it, it will be without being logged in and only the odd search for something I need.

And hopefully, improvements to platforms like Lemmy grow to where I can search for what I need there or find the best community to ask a question in a few seconds rather than 5-10 minutes. No hate, just where the platform is at right now with the influx.

I'm not sure why you think you need to avoid Reddit at cost to you finding the information you're after.

If the information you want is on Reddit, why wouldn't you want to read it?