That's a bit...extreme.

Fortunately Reddit is doing a great job diminishing its own usability. When Reddit enables their paid API and locks out 3rd party clients in the process, there will be greater friction to browse. When they eventually kill old.reddit.com that'll be the nail in the coffin.

This has been massively effective for me for weaning off Reddit and Instagram. My phone usage (basically perfectly correlated with all non-productive screen time) has dropped by a solid 50% and has remained that way for 2+ years now.

Even technical/niche subreddits get absolutely run over by "noobs" and people who have too many questions but too little patience to do research for themselves. And comments on Reddit are beyond bland - they might as well adopt a slogan of "The Parrot Club" at this point.

My point being, Reddit is likely the easiest platform to give up because it never provided any value/intrigue in the first place.

I'm old, so my route there is roughly: Dial-up BBS's -> usenet -> various web forums -> slashdot -> fark -> digg -> reddit. So I've experience the best and the worst of it all, and I'm not sure that reddit represents the best. I do not believe that they wield their [immense] power in a responsible or trustworthy manner.

I'm very curious to see what comes after reddit.

Reddit was as close as I got to social media, and it sucked. The longer I spend apart from it, the more alien and irrational the ideas seem. People repeating themselves over and over in every thread, all it takes is one prompt for the conversations to derail - it's like a poorly tuned 7B LLM.

I knew it was "awful", but I guess I'd developed an immunity to it. They're doing future models a great service by limiting their API.

Reminds me of the James Woods segment of this movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Eye_(1985_film)#.22Qui...

I block all time sinks during working hours with an exception of 2 minutes every 4 hours to quickly check whether the world is ending. My productivity has skyrocketed.

I hate it and I hate reddit- it's a fucking cringy place full of arrogant twerps that post know it all comments that leave no room for any conversation, or just people trying to be witty. (normally the top 5 comments are these)

I'd love a return to phpbb forums for everything.

There are hobby-specific online communities, but frankly, those don't appear as healthy and having as much interest.

Obviously YMMV.

I haven’t used social media in years, but I remember when I quit it how I would sometimes be on my laptop doing something and almost out of habit hit “Ctrl + T” for a new tab and type the first few letters of Reddit or instagram.

I do occasionally forget to block it after using it, and within a week I'm doom-scrolling again. But I eventually have a moment of clarity and block it, and I'm back to normal again.

I don't think people ever completely give things up unless they have one of those addictive personalities and find themselves tipsy on Monday morning, or completely plastered every night at 9pm. I don't have an addictive personality because I have this voice that tells me "you're doing this again,stop!" And that tends to work. So I treat Reddit like beer or chocolate. I self-moderate my intake. A blocker is enough. It's the equivalent of NEVER having a stash of beer or chocolate in the house. I actually need to plan my intake by explicitly adding them to a shopping list, and even then I just buy 2 small cans of some weird hazy IPA or a small-but-ridiculously-expensive chocolate. That way I can occasionally treat myself without falling off the wagon.

I use Brave for any social media apps on the phone, or just don't use them except at home.

As a bonus, you're much less likely to be walking the streets like a zombie staring at your phone.

It's funny cause old reddit simply in the mobile browser itself is 100% better than any mobile app

To me, the fact that there's an active subreddit specifically for every personal interest is exactly what makes it so addictive. It's a very concentrated dose of the drug. Like I'm in the US Army, and there's r/army where basically every thread hits very close to home, so I have a strong opinion or a story or insight to share. Then I'm also into personal finance, and there's even r/MilitaryFinance because a lot of personal finance issues are unique to our situation.

Before Reddit, there were some old-school forums for these niches, but they were short-lived and not nearly as active. On bigger, more active old-school forums about something like personal finance, most of the threads just don't pertain to me so it's easier to use them in moderation. Like a thread about military stuff will end up here on Hacker News once every couple of weeks, and I'll get excited to make a comment, but that's it.

Anyway, I decided that I needed to logout from Reddit, delete my browsing history so that old.reddit.com didn't autofill in my address bar anymore (I wasn't even using the mobile app), and delete my Reddit password from my password manager.

Not for me. I really like reddit but I feel the same way as you in some regards such as the "The parrot club".

I mean, at some point the discussions in r/GilmoreGirls ran stale and repetitive but I can't say I didn't enjoy the ride in that subreddit, and if not for reddit I wouldn't have read so many different and equal opinions to mine regarding the show.

Even the subreddit dedicated to my country. Years ago it was this place to share opinions about what is good or what needs to be improved, interesting places to visit and really funny anecdotes(Keeping in mind they can be false). Now it's just a place to complain about the current government.

Reddit got really popular in the last years and it shows that quantity increased at the cost of quality.