Reddit habit is hard to break.
I went searching for something today and instinctually clicked on a reddit link. Fortunately the sub was dark for the protest anyway, but it's crazy how ingrained in me it is to go to reddit for everything.
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.
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”.
We all have to do our part to talk about the products and services we use here on Lemmy. Does anyone know of a good community similar to /r/buyitforlife on the fediverse?
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.
There are archives of Reddit history, notably the Pushshift archive & current ongoing Archive Team archive. Much of the data can be searched on the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive.
What does LLM mean?
It means "large language model", software like ChatGPT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
Large Language Model. A type of AI such as Chat GPT
Large Language Model (like GPT-4)
Google search has just gotten so incredibly bad. It's even getting bad at programming searches which used to be a strong suit. Luckily duckduckgo has actually gotten better.
I know it's not exactly what you're looking for, but don't forget you can often grab a cached copy of the page if you found it via Google. That's probably the best way to extract some information without giving Reddit a hit right now.
I think it's perfectly okay to compromise. I'm gonna hopefully use Lemmy as Reddit, and if I can't find the desired info on here, then Reddit will help me out. I can already find lemmy posts when searching for infos.
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 have set a 0 minute timer on Boost and Infinity, so I can't navigate to reddit. On the first day of blackout I had to open reddit to try and find the name for lemmy, squabbles and raddle so I had some alternatives as I couldn't remember them!
I have opened and closed youtube way too many times. It's been tough. I even went to 4chan after many year last night. A real blast from the past.
Full relapse yesterday.
I'm hoping to do better today.
We so need a RedditsAnonymous!
It's going to take time to reposition, but for the long haul this is the best course of action, personally I've uninstalled and blocked - but I do miss some of the subreddits from before.
This community seems to be in its early steps, so every contribution means progress, and sooner rather than later we'll be back to where we want to be!
Ive been tapping the empty space on my phone where the reddit app was out of habit all day
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.
The key is amassing a large enough audience of people who want something new, not just people who want a 1:1 replacement for reddit. There's no way lemmy will be able to compete in content volume but I think the idea of "non corporate" social media will be attractive to people
Muscle memory is also hard to break. I had to remove Apollo from my homescreen :D
I know the feeling. I had to put it in a folder “Do not use”. It’s like the first rhing I check in the morning. This lemmy thing has potential. I miss Apollo so much though. Jesus if Christian ported Apollo to use a lemmy backend I’m not sure I’d even notice it wasn’t Reddit. 😀
I put Discord in its place, my muscle memory has been opening it all morning.
Same lol. Replaced the icon with the Lemmy app for Android and here I am 👍🏻
I made a shortcut automation in iOS to close Apollo as soon as it's opened. Works & has caught me in my habit a few times already. lmao
I replaced my reddit icon with Jerboa. I'm working on my own client in the mean time, though
Did the same! Now I don’t have to think twice before clicking it.
I keep unlocking my phone then opening Apollo, then realising what day it was then locking my phone again.
In a constant endless loop.
I did the same. I put Mlem in place of my Apollo icon.
We're all in rehab 😐
Honestly I'm trying to retrain my brain to type beehaw instead of reddit as a reflex when I open a new tab. Beehaw is literally my rehab
I named my lemmy instance bookmark "Shmeddit"
@jellyfish It really makes me aware of how strong the muscle memory “I’m bored what should I read” impulse has become.
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.
I have this problem because Google hasn't been as good the past few years unless I append "reddit" to my search. During all of this going on, I've been trying to be diligent about viewing the cached version instead, but it's not always available.
This is one of the problems for me. I frequently search tech issues and more often than not, a lot of links are from Reddit.
Really specific issues are more often than not only found in reddit, and that's not even all, for me at least; a lot of those answers in reddit are short and to the point. Sometimes you search for the solution of a problem and find posts on websites filled with irrelevant information that you don't really have the time/patience to read. . .
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.
perhaps some lunatic out there will try preserving some of that in the fediverse, although I guess it will be nigh impossible to separate the quality content from the mountains of shit
edit: of course they're already on it: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiveteam_has_saved_over_108_billion_reddit/
ArchiveTeam has been archiving Reddit posts for a while now, but we are running out of time. So far, we have archived 10.81 billion links, with 150 million to go.
Recent news of the Reddit API cost changes will force many of the top 3rd party Reddit apps to shut down. This will not only affect how people use Reddit, but it will also cause issues with many subreddit moderation bots which rely on the API to function. Many subreddits have agreed to shut down for 48 hours on June 12th, while others will be gone indefinitely unless this issue is resolved. We are archiving Reddit posts so that in the event that the API cost change is never addressed, we can still access posts from those closed subreddits.
I know it's kinda irreplaceable. I think I will stop mindless browsing Reddit but will still go there occasionally when I'm looking for specific advice.
This will be how I use it as well. Reddit usually tends to have the most concise, up-to-date answers for a lot of questions that I have about most my hobbies. Especially video games.
That will hopefully change, but it was such a good way to basically guarantee I found the information I actually wanted.
I'd be interested to know from someone more tech-savvy whether googling advice, and then clicking on the cached version, still counts as viewing reddit. Because I'd ideally still like to append reddit to my google searches without giving them ad views.
AKA if someone monetises advice given for free, we should be able to freely access it.
Me too, it will be difficult to fix that fucking bug that just you and one lost redditor has experienced lol
Those were all the best groups. I've seen a few of knowledge-based reddits setting to read-only instead of private, so they're still searchable.
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.
yea me too, lol. i just put jerboa in the same spot I had sync to use my muscle memory for good
Haha, I did the same. Put Mlem in place of Apollo
Exactly what I did. I put Lemmy in it's place
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...
It allows your car to become damaged if you hit a surface too hard. Being damaged will screw up your steering.
Finally, closure. Thanks a bunch lol.
Damn love this place already
Hmm, somebody should make a Lemmy instance that just has a copy of Reddit in it. Probably somewhere hard to sue.
Wouldn't it face the same issues that 3rd party apps are?
For anything after June 30, yes, although if you're really being adversarial you could try and scrape Reddit. Everything that's already on Reddit, though? That has been archived in other places. I don't know about you, but I semi-regularly need to look at a post a few years old.
The advantage would be that it would be totally seamless. If you wanted to see me speculating about underwater aliens making non-metallic electronics you could just go to !SpeculateEvolution@fediverseredditclone.ru and it would be like anything else on here.
I think not because federation would make it easy to mirror.
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.
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.
Yeah, as long as content builds out faster than I consume it I could be quite happy here.
Fr, it is very hard to break. I instinctively add "reddit" to the end of every search.
This speaks to how bad Google has gotten IMO - I do it too.
Yup
I know, it’s so much harder to find answers to anything past very simple answers with Google these days. After the blackout, I’ll probably do far less jumping straight to Reddit, but I feel like it’s still going to be unavoidable sometimes.
After the subreddits go un-dark I will probably still use this for searching until there's a LLM set-up to "replace" google searching (which Bing is Still Not, imo).
Yeah, even if I quit using reddit as a community tool the information value is huge. When something breaks on a niche subject they can be the only easy to find source.
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?
I think a Reddit type platform lends itself better to federation than something like Twitter. Reddit is already split up into sub communities so it's easier to digest vs. Mastadon/Twitter meant to be one big conversation.
Your question about non-technical savoy folks being on here is valid and there's probably not many. But Reddit also started out like that and it took many years before it became mainstream. Federated serves are a new thing, even for the technological literate, so I suspect it will take a while to permeate into casual internet users but it will happen in the future.
I wonder if you could design an instance to completely hide the federated aspect by default. So far I've barely needed to think about the federation, it feels a lot like just Reddit.
Yeah I can see a path for this ramping up slowly, especially given the horrible mismanagement of places like Reddit. Even if they weather the storm of the blackout, given the official app, it seems like they're just chasing the same infinite dumb stream of memes design that places like Facebook and Tiktok have already embraced. Probably because that's where the money is? I don't know.
The more niche communities are always what made me hang out at Reddit though! I'd bet they continue to alienate and marginalize them enough that more people continually jump ship over the next couple of years. I do hope Beehaw and other spaces like it succeed in becoming a non-profit and truly community driven, and the web decentralizes itself again.
it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here!
it just works! I don't know what happens with this reply because I guess beehaw.org is offline right now, but I figure you'll eventually see it? That this is possible with an organic collection of instances is pretty damn cool, and I hope it keeps on working as more people pile on
responding from beehaw: Yep, we can see you!
I'll say that sometimes, I click the "Reply" button after writing my reply and it just sits there, seemingly loading forever. Generally has been doing that when a thread was on beehaw.org or lemmy.ml
it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here!
How do you see that?
It just seemed to complicated for average person to grok.
Oh, yeah definitely. I'm still struggling to wrap my head around the most basic things. Like, initially I created multiple accounts until I realized I could actually just search for stuff in other instances.
On the website if the username looks like user@instance.com, then it is a user from another instance.
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.
This is a very good question - when I'm troubleshooting things my default search pattern is: "
<problem>
2023 reddit", because 99% of the other search results are pure garbage.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.
Thanks for this. It would be cool if it was available for FF on mobile. I suppose it will stop working for Reddit after the API changes.
If my programming was a bit better I'd make an extension that redirects to the most recent archive.org capture. That would keep working after the API changes and keep me from actually visiting Reddit. Maybe I should learn how.
Redirector is another option for this. It's a generic tool so it doesn't have baked in rules, you have to specify your own.
I use ^https://(old\\.|www\\.)?reddit.com/r/(.*) for the source pattern and https://your-favorite-libreddit-instance/r/$2 as the destination.
I kept googling questions and clicking on the reddit posts. Reddit seems to be the only place to get some real answers sometimes.
It's so hard to weed out the sites that are sponsored to endorse certain products when you're searching for something, or sites that are removing any negative reviews. With Reddit I feel like I could find real honest opinions from people.
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.
Anyone know if there's a good lemmy community for tracking the creation of new communities? In particular, ones that existed on reddit and now exist here?
theres a little bit of movement starting on !newcommunities@lemmy.world I don't know how to make a link that automatically sends you to your specific instances /c/newcommunities@lemmy.world so that you can subscribe immediately, just cut and paste the name.
I think something like this would be a fantastic idea and would help accelerate adoption.
Discoverability is a real shortcoming of Lemmy but if we circle around one or more communities focused on helping connect users to communities it could ease the transition significantly.
Time to start burning the lemmy UI into your phone screen to cover up the reddit scars
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.
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.
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.
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.
I deleted the RIF icon from my main phone screen so I wouldn't instinctively click on it. That void feels real weird.
I deleted RIF from its spot after 11 years and put Jerboa in the spot. Those are big shoes to fill.
Jeroba if you're on Android. Can't remember the Apple one
This app looks so good to be honest, already feel smoother than Reddit BS app.
The Apple one is called Mlem, but it's still buggy and limited when you want to search for new communities.
Yeah I replaced the Relay icon with Jerboa.
My browser has an option to turn sites into a progressive web app, so I have been using those for fediverse sites and put them where RIF used to be on my home screen.
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'm in the same boat. All my Apollo browsing time has been spent on learning this. I basically just tipped Christian £10 then checked out. mlem for iOS is surprisingly good, I feel pretty at home on it, at least for basic scroll browsing
That's the only issue with these multi-instance semi-decentralized solutions, we need users to spread out and learn how to sync in with the rest from there. Ideally, there would be some automated system to set users up on their lowest latency server with the most free capacity, or to be able to move a user to another server without having to start again.
federated isn't actually the same thing as decentralized. lemmy isn't intended to simply be a decentralized network of identical nodes that can automatically be synced and load balanced.
it is expected that each instance will be have it's own flavor, and have the autonomy to decide which other instances to mesh with.
think more like a network of grassroot communities, and less like a MacDonald's franchise.
i removed my reddit bookmarks and added lemmy instead. now i instinctually come here instead.
I'm keeping reddark open on another monitor as a reminder to stay away
Hadn't seen this. That's pretty cool.
What's weird is that I never used Reddit as much as I use Lemmy over last few days 😅
I'm not quite sure why, but Lemmy has the same effect on me.
I was pretty active on Reddit, but Lemmy feels different somehow. I genuinely want to engage multiple communities and post way more often.
I'm having the opposite experience. I feel like it's already so active here I can't keep up in bigger communities like this one.
I think it’s because there are less of us so posts are not full of ”this is the way” comments on the top burying all the discussion. Also usually someone had already said what I would’ve said anyway 😄
I feel you. I try to make a point of commenting even though before I probably wouldn’t. I think Lemmy can really work, but we need to put in the effort.
It's pretty painful, but I have to admit: I'm a lot more productive today at work
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.
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)
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 been testing out other search engines and have currently landed on Brave Search. Every single time you search, there's a big block of threads from reddit near the top of the search results. It's not been easy to stay away.
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.
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.
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!
Honestly I feel like there doesn't need to be as many people as reddit has. No one is going to read through 10000 comments so what's the difference if there's only a few hundred
That's fair, and I honestly prefer smaller communities anyway that only get a few hundred responses.
But my main concern is a risk of lack of breadth. With a large userbase, you have more niche communities. If you only have a few thousand active users, you'll probably only have a few dozen active communities, and many won't be of interest to you. I'm having this issue right now, where I'm subbed to 10-20 communities, but only 5 or so actually have regular posts, and many of those are meta posts about Lemmy itself. On Reddit, I was subbed to a fair few more, and most had multiple posts in a given day.
So I'm trying to be proactive in generating content for the communities I'm interested in to hopefully encourage more people to engage. Nobody likes being the only one posting, so I'm trying to be a good example and get the ball rolling.
Agreed. And, so far, the mood is better here abs comments are much higher quality. I've been using normal forums again for the past few months and I've grown to like smaller communities.
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 considering filtering reddit out using Portmaster since I use Portmaster anyway.
Similar - I added it to my PiHole blacklist. It can vanish along with Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram!
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.
yeah... there are a few places where reddit is really good though, like troubleshooting advice for computers and code. probably has to do with attracting a sizable chunk of those communities.
some incorrect answers get upvotes ironically, often when the correct answer seems obvious. but I guess it depends on the type of question, and the sub
Hopefully you had the time to write out a detailed reply? ;)
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 simply replaced the Reddit Sync shortcut with Jerboa on my phone, works wonders for me :) just need to find a few good replacement communities
That seems like a nice workaround (I miss the monet icon to be honest) how did you achieve this?
Oh I'm sorry if my post was confusing, I didn't mean that the icon is still the Reddit Sync one, it's the ugly Jerboa one. But muscle memory is the stronger factor for me, so it works well
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!
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.
ChatGPT can be a handy way to get certain information as well.
You need to be careful what info from ChatGPT you can trust. It has only trained on data up to a certain date, and is known to just make stuff up. Don't rely on it for anything critical
Not even current data. I was having a look at its capabilities in propositional logic, which has been around for literal centuries. Still very (I can't stress just how very) basic mistakes made. And I mean in its explanations, not in any actual doing of logic.
It can be. It just also can be a handy way to get pure misinformation really convincingly. (I guess that's still not that different than Reddit lol)
Came here to say the same. I’ve replaced google searches with BingAI prompts and get what I need, AD free, just about every time.
It was allegedly trained on reddit for cheap too!
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.
I unfortunately had to use reddit to resolve an issue with angular 😭😭😭
Yeah, I'm definitely going to keep going back to Reddit for tech issues. There's over a decade of information there and it'll take a long time before any alternatives can compare.
Seriously! I ended up blocking reddit and its subdomains with my pihole so that I'd stop clicking on things from google searches.
Had to do the same, too much of a habit searching through reddit so complete block was neccessary .
I'm not there yet but I'm thinking about it. Deleting Apollo on my phone was half the battle. I try to come here whenever I'm tempted to open Reddit.
I setup TimeLimit to block the reddit apps for some time. I hope it can help you with the redde-addiction.
Same here. It was equal parts freeing and uncomfortable. Recommend https://redact.dev/ for anyone looking to do the same.
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.
Search results are so full of trash I had the habbit of adding reddit to the search
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.
A suggestion I've seen is to add reddit.com to your ublock origin "my filters" page. It works great for me!
Forward it to Lemmy :)
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 🙁
It could help to add reddit.com to your hosts file or your ublock origin filter list.
Change your DNS to make it redirect to Lemmy.
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.
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.
Anyone have a good regex to add to my pi-hole to block reddit?
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.
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.
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.
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 🤡
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?
Reddit blackout. A part of the protest comes from the subreddit mods that made the subs private, the other part comes from the user not using reddit at all during these days
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
Now I will doomscroll on Lemmy. Problem solved
Tbh the lack of people and content here has limited my doom scrolling tremendously.
Also helps that everyone here is like a kid on their first day of high school or college. Zero toxicity! 😎
Same. I'm feeling so good about myself now.
Actually for the first time I'm contributing now, on reddit I tried a few times but I never liked it, and never did more than liking.
If people stop providing useful information on reddit, it's usefulness will disappear over time.
There are also lots of people using Shreddit to remove their entire log of comments.
I'm debating whether or not to do that with my account... I have several comments with solutions to specific tech issues, documentation on specific things. At the same time, I feel less and less comfortable with Reddit benefiting from information users provided for free.
We also don't know if search engines will pay the new fees to index reddit, so that could potentially make it disappear faster.
I mean reddit has become a insanely huge knowledge base for all sorts of technical problems and other topics. I've searched with site:reddit.com so many times for problem solving.
Yeah exactly and me too! It will still have its use (until they decide to remove that too).
Funnily enough, I’ve found that ChatGPT gives really good technical troubleshooting tips (like DIY and programming stuff). Cuts my troubleshoot time down tremendously.
I think this is exactly right. I plan to use info available on reddit as reference material if needs be, but I will no longer be posting and therefore creating more content for reddit to sell on in the future.
Personally it feels like working for free by posting on Reddit. Id rather create content about my hobbies here where no one is making money off of it.