this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Now I will doomscroll on Lemmy. Problem solved

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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! 😎

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

If people stop providing useful information on reddit, it's usefulness will disappear over time.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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”.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The problem with that is, that not all instances use "Lemmy" or even "feddit" in the URL.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Hopefully search engines can eventually work around that.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Ive been tapping the empty space on my phone where the reddit app was out of habit all day

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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. 😀

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

This is a very good question - when I'm troubleshooting things my default search pattern is: " 2023 reddit", because 99% of the other search results are pure garbage.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This speaks to how bad Google has gotten IMO - I do it too.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It allows your car to become damaged if you hit a surface too hard. Being damaged will screw up your steering.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Finally, closure. Thanks a bunch lol.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

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