alt Hacker News> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube
Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.
I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit
Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.
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I'm a frequent Reddit user. Recently they have been bringing some of the more poisonous elements of social media over to their platform. Pushing a "for you" feed, and prioritizing a "Best" sorting algorithm over "new" or "hot".
I genuinely think Reddit is basically cable news for millenials.
> When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media.
It can be, but it can also (still) be sanitized.
I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible.
There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.
Reddit is a site which I would only recommend to someone I truly hated. It's poison on every level imaginable, more so than basically any other social media I've ever used.
People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.
My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. It’s hard giving up those sites, not because that’s where the people are but because we are all addicted to them. If you switch to mastodon or pixelfed, you’ll find good stuff there, but you won’t engage with it as much because it’s not algo driven, which to me is a win.
X is honestly among the worst of the worst. People give purposefully bad takes just for the engagement and it's overall super toxic
Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind
YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life
Reddit on defaults is a crazy experience.
Subs with names like /r/wowlookatthis are posting blatant "west bad" propaganda. Making USA and EU people feel bad.
Yet I walk outside in Sweden and I'm in one of the best functioning and beautiful nations in the world. Yet Swedish Reddit will post "west bad" propaganda on how everything is right wing doom. I mean from their perspective, sure... but so so so wrong they are. I just hope they get some refugees in their houses.
I have some curated subreddits I use for work related stuff. For politics it is suffering. Now watch the left think it is due to right wing dominance. Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy.
I have a predisposition for that, and Reddit is indeed poison for some of us. I blocked it with pihole, along with most other social media sites, years ago.
Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it.
And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone.
It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.