This article was incredibly interesting to me given the chain of events that have unfolded at Reddit.
I used to be a hardcore Reddit user. On the site daily for ten years or so. While I didn't spend hours on the site per day (though there were some days where I definitely did), I _had_ to visit it every day or I would be irritable.
Note that I felt like this despite unsubscribing to every subreddit in favor of multireddits (so that my front page would be empty), not enabling notifications on the site, disabling infinite scroll and having a very limited set of subs in my multis, few of which I'd consider classic time-wasters (like /r/consulting, which is mostly consulting memes, or /r/programmerhumor).
A problem with Reddit (for me) is that despite doing all of this, there is essentially infinite content, and all of it is interesting!
Since I also browsed Hacker News, what ultimately happened was that I would speed-run HN and Reddit in an attempt to be "caught up" during the "limited free time" I had to myself.
Like many here, I quit Reddit cold-turkey a month ago when Reddit committed to their new API pricing strategy and Christian committed to sunsetting Apollo. I figured that it was only a matter of time until Reddit sunsets old.reddit, I had no interest in being forced to use new.reddit, and all of the subs I cared about were (rightfully!) going dark and losing subscribers in the process.
Since I browse Hacker News via skimfeed.com (excellent curator) and there are, at most, 15 posts on there at a time, I don't spend nearly as much time on "Internet things" as I did before. However, my tolerance for reading (and writing!) long form like this has gone way up! I think this is due to me not feeling as if I need to split my time as aggressively as I did before.
I'm also much more chill about "needing" to browse daily. I still hit up HN every day, but because there is so little to catch up on, I feel like I got much more of my time back now.
(One more thing. Reddit, by and large, rewards short, quippy, knee-jerk responses. Longform is typically skipped over. You don't have to think very much to use the site. Ironically, it is very easy to scroll through a Reddit thread while also feeling rushed to speed-run through it to get caught up.
Very different from HN, where the content is very interesting, and longer comments tend to be upvoted more.)
I used to be a hardcore Reddit user. On the site daily for ten years or so. While I didn't spend hours on the site per day (though there were some days where I definitely did), I _had_ to visit it every day or I would be irritable.
Note that I felt like this despite unsubscribing to every subreddit in favor of multireddits (so that my front page would be empty), not enabling notifications on the site, disabling infinite scroll and having a very limited set of subs in my multis, few of which I'd consider classic time-wasters (like /r/consulting, which is mostly consulting memes, or /r/programmerhumor).
A problem with Reddit (for me) is that despite doing all of this, there is essentially infinite content, and all of it is interesting!
Since I also browsed Hacker News, what ultimately happened was that I would speed-run HN and Reddit in an attempt to be "caught up" during the "limited free time" I had to myself.
Like many here, I quit Reddit cold-turkey a month ago when Reddit committed to their new API pricing strategy and Christian committed to sunsetting Apollo. I figured that it was only a matter of time until Reddit sunsets old.reddit, I had no interest in being forced to use new.reddit, and all of the subs I cared about were (rightfully!) going dark and losing subscribers in the process.
Since I browse Hacker News via skimfeed.com (excellent curator) and there are, at most, 15 posts on there at a time, I don't spend nearly as much time on "Internet things" as I did before. However, my tolerance for reading (and writing!) long form like this has gone way up! I think this is due to me not feeling as if I need to split my time as aggressively as I did before.
I'm also much more chill about "needing" to browse daily. I still hit up HN every day, but because there is so little to catch up on, I feel like I got much more of my time back now.
(One more thing. Reddit, by and large, rewards short, quippy, knee-jerk responses. Longform is typically skipped over. You don't have to think very much to use the site. Ironically, it is very easy to scroll through a Reddit thread while also feeling rushed to speed-run through it to get caught up.
Very different from HN, where the content is very interesting, and longer comments tend to be upvoted more.)