a week without reddit
20 june 2023
it's been a week without reddit now, and i'm not missing it as much as i thought i might. actually, the only thing i specifically miss is discussion posts about tv shows and movies. i haven't sought out a replacement, but i can't think of a forum that has the same density of discussion as the various show/movie subreddits.
i don't even know if there's been an update on their ridiculous api pricing scheme. but i used reddit via a third-party mobile app, rif, 99.9% of the time. i've never tried their official app, but i've heard nothing but bad things. and i have no interest now that they are doing a hostile march to a walled garden.
the last time this happened, when ellen pao was made, ceo, i tried jumping to voat and empeopled. voat became an alt-right haven and i quickly stopped visiting it. empeopled was an interesting experiment in a fully self-governing site. i spent some time on it, but eventually went back to reddit. last i saw, empeopled is now almost abandonware, and seems to focus on its whole bitcoin goal instead of fostering communities.
i've been visiting hacker news for several years now. oddly, it has almost become my "work reddit". i would avoid visiting reddit at work and instead visit hacker news. i've been visiting slashdot more often the past few months, even before the whole api debacle. these are good enough for now until i can find a good replacement for the communities reddit had. stumbleupon's successor, cloudhiker (formerly stumble), is fine for discovery, but there's no community. i've heard kbin and lemmy are decent, growing, alternatives this time around. and they're federated, which i guess is good. we'll see.
i think this will ultimately kill reddit. i might be wrong. but i'm done with it.