Nope. I quit cold turkey on June 30 and haven’t been back. Well, not on purpose, at least. Sometimes a Google result sends me to Reddit, but when it loads I just close it and move to the next result. Lemmy works fine for everything I used Reddit for.
I try to ask myself what the motivation of the FOMO is. Does it come from me, or is the platform/game/whatever designed to make me feel that way?
If it’s coming from the design of the thing, and I notice that design, that can immediately change my attitude toward it. It’s not “I want to play one more game” anymore, it’s “this game is pressuring me to play one more game.” Does the game have my best interests at heart? Am I comfortable with being pressured by this game? I find those questions really reframe the FOMO and help me step back from it.
If the FOMO is actually coming from me, now it’s a question of priorities. If I’m spending time watching one more video on this platform, there’s something else I’m not going to get to. So the question for myself is “out of all the things I can be doing right now, is this the thing I want to do most?” Sometimes the answer is yes! I might take want to catch up on the latest news if I haven’t checked in today. But if I’ve been doomscrolling for hours, the answer is probably no. And framing that as a choice between a bunch of activities instead of the simple FOMO choice of one more click makes that easier to see.
Lemmy scratches the Reddit itch for me. It doesn’t have all my old niche communities yet, but it’s got enough for me to log on and see what’s happening in the Internet.
Also, I haven’t been pestered to use an app since I got here, which is so nice. Reddit was getting more and more aggressive about that before I quit.
I was a mod on Reddit so I was personally aware that for years Reddit’s mod tools have been totally inadequate for the job, that Reddit has been promising to give us something better, and that Reddit has failed to deliver. Honestly, it was even worse than just not delivering: we’d get new tools that didn’t solve the main problems, were only available on the iOS app, coming to Android eventually, and coming to the websites never. Third party API tools were the only thing that made modding vaguely functional, even on a small sub.
I’m also a supporter of accessibility in apps, which is also something Reddit has been promising for years and Reddit has failed to deliver. Again, third party API tools are the only thing that makes Reddit vaguely accessible right now.
Reddit’s API changes are not realistic to implement in a single month. This was made clear early on and Reddit has refused to budge. So at this point Reddit is knowingly upending an ecosystem that makes their site usable by groups of users with no first-party replacements ready. And given their history of failing to deliver these very tools, I have no confidence that they will ever do so.
And THEN the Spez AMA happened. I was hoping he’d listen to the community, engage with our concerns, or at the very least actually do an AMA. Instead he got caught lying, he got caught astroturfing, and he inadvertently made it clear that the real issue was that he was butthurt over these third party apps being better at business than Reddit was. Oh, and later we found out the Reddit CEO really admired Elon Musk’s handling of Twitter, a platform I left for all the reasons Spez seems to like it.
Even if none of these issues affected me personally (which they do), Reddit has made it clear that I just can’t trust them to run a fair and functional platform. They do not take their obligations to their users, mods, and business partners seriously. If they don’t like the way the game is going, they’ll change the rules without warning. They will promise features they will not deliver even when those features are essential to their site working for the users who keep it alive.
I don’t want to help Reddit build what Reddit wants to make anymore.
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social is the author of the SMBC webcomic and he posts funny stuff pretty frequently.
@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org does art with open source tools, including the open source Pepper and Carrot comic.
@SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to posts dumb memes constantly.
@Popehat@mastodon.social posts smartassed yet accurate commentary on current legal news.