30 Days Without Reddit

Starting tomorrow I am going to spend the next 30 days not looking at or engaging with Reddit at all. Not that anyone cares, I just want announce this somewhere to make myself feel just a little bit of accountability.

Why?

I don’t use much social media, and have managed to break my compulsion to check and inevitably endlessly scroll apps like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter. I wasted a lot of time in my teens and some college years scrolling through these apps.

I have become increasingly concerned with protecting my attention and breaking social media addiction in recent years, and for the most part have succeeded, the only major platforms I use still are Reddit and YouTube.

Reddit has been the hardest to break. Which is a bit ironic, because frankly I hate current state of Reddit. I have had a Reddit account for almost 10 years now and have watched its gradual enshitification.

I make excuses to myself for keeping Reddit because it is sometimes maybe helpful. But this “helpfulness” is greatly overstated when I actually sit back and think about it.

Sure, a lot of times when I have a question about something and there is a Reddit thread posted by a person with the same question. But how often do I get quality answers from Reddit? Maybe 50% if being generous. Most of the time quality answers comes from reading the official documentation for the tool I’m using or even a StackOverflow thread. I think I greatly overstate how much I need Reddit for research and answering my questions and I want to prove it by seeing how I do without using it at all for work or personal use for at least the next 30 days.

Regardless of whether it is a technical or non-technical question, I find myself getting stuck down endless “research” rabbit holes, and wasting time reading comment after comment, leaving with only a half-baked answer, and feeling annoyed with myself afterwards for wasting so much time.

I have blacklisted all Reddit-related domains on my Pi-Hole to keep myself off on all my personal devices.

I’ll try and make an update in 30 days. Might not be that interesting though. I just wanted to do this as a challenge to myself and provide some context on why.