I have (had) a 9 year old Reddit account, that I unironically grew up with. I created it when I was 12 (sue me COPPA) to comment on a Cookie Clicker subreddit. I remember my cakeday, May 28, 2014.

It really was a lifestyle app. The account had comments on all the games I played as a teenager, fitness and university subreddits, random hobbies I picked up for a few months, basically every single one of my interests for the past decade. I had a NSFW burner that received frequent use. I have to say, you're pretty accurate about how I was basically active and commenting once or more a week for the majority of my conscious life. I started using the RiF app on a god awful 2010 phone when I created my account, and have used Sync since probably 2016.

I blanked then wiped all of my comments and then deleted my account two weeks ago. To be truthful, Reddit had a much different feel already, but nothing can stay constant for that long. It was already frustrating me that (my perceived) quality of discussion on the site has steadily become dumber and any mainstream news or political sub is astroturfed to hell (presumably by the Russians). I started seeing the emoji or "lol who cares" in response to perfectly normal comments. The East Palestine derailment frenzy was what made me realize that the website is definitely attacked by coordinated actors. I spent the last few months on the site browsing /r/neoliberal not because I necessarily agreed with the tenets of the ideology, but because it was one of the few reasonable political subs left, and /r/CredibleDefence for broadly pro-West but reasonable takes on the war.

I slowly realized that I was reading empty content. Much of my time on the site was seeing a clearly stupid, if not false comment, and realizing that the effort I would put in debunking or arguing was going to reach two or three eyeballs. Essentially, much of Reddit is the one eyed preaching to the blind. I frequently typed up long comments (much like this one) for an hour or so, and returned to maybe 4-5 upvotes, since the post had already peaked in popularity. I had a few long posts in /r/summonerschool , a League of Legends advice subreddit that were probably 10x the detail of any other comment advice and took me an hour to watch their gameplay and give specific comments.

In short, I felt I was trying to suck shit water from an Olympic sized pool through a lifestraw and hoping it would clean it up. The 3rd party app ban was a huge fucking slap to my face. Call me arrogant, but I believe I contributed more than my fair share to the running of Reddit by creating high quality discourse on the website. And in return? I get slapped with a shit UI and advertisements up my ass through the official app. And spez's response showed a complete lack of any attention to the website, to any concerns to the community that is most of the value proposition of their site. Their claims to be looking for profit now are transparent as fuck when you remember all their failed, clearly unmonetizable crap they've put dev hours and low interest money on in the past few years (NFTs, the other crypto crap, whatever RPAN was supposed to be). Coast by on institutional inertia while you piss away money, let the website decline in quality, and then aggressively try to monetize from the most loyal users (the decade long user who uses a third party app)? No thanks.

So yeah, I blew up my account. To be honest, I am having some withdrawal symptoms and am trying hard not to relapse, but I see it as the only moral route to proceed. The internet is broadly really quite bad. Twitter is tolerable but has similar ethical issues and quality depends very much on topic. I am getting into Substack, but that is ultimately a newsletter publisher and not a discussion forum. Any non-reddit result on Google is unusable. Maybe the internet will agree on a replacement. Maybe it keeps on spiralling down the enshittification drain. For now, HackerNews occupies the space on my phone's home screen that Reddit used to. I hope the future isn't as crap as I anticipate.

Rant over.