Deleted a reddit account

Today I Deleted my Reddit Account

This is something I’d been considering doing for quite some time, and had just been putting it off. 

This morning, however, I found myself in an argument with a random internet stranger over something very small and trivial - this doesn’t happen often, at all. 

I think in the two years I’ve been on Reddit, I’ve experienced this maybe three times. 

Nonetheless, today it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I realized, afterward, that I was actually getting upset over something this person, somewhere on the other side of the internet, whom I would never know and never have to interact with, was saying. That’s not healthy.

I started examining how I’ve been using Reddit over the past several months and realized that the site was cutting into a significant chunk of my day. Reddit hadn’t interfered with my work productivity, but it had become a thing to do late at night, a way of killing time and distracting myself.

One thing was clear: Reddit had ceased to become a useful, positive thing for me.
For someone with an addictive personality (admittedly my own shortcoming), a site like Reddit can easily suck you in with distractions and lead to a lot of time being wasted over what is largely trivial, petty, and inconsequential content.

There are those who jump to defend the community (I’ve been there myself) and would say that Reddit isn’t a site you can really take at face value ; that in order to get the most out of it, you need to get past r/all and build your own collection of specific subreddits relevant to your interests.

That’s very true. This does greatly improve the quality of content you’re exposed to while on the site, but the signal to noise ratio is still very high.

I realized that the vast majority of useful links, news, insights, and resources I was collecting came from other sources, like Hacker News, Twitter, or more often, friends and co-workers. 

Usually, by the time I saw something interesting on Reddit, I’d already heard about it from some other source.

As I said, Reddit had ceased to be a positive thing for me and had simply become a distraction. 

There are any number of things I could be doing besides Reddit that would make me a happier person.

I could work on personal projects, spend more time with friends and family, start a new hobby, write more, or even give my beagle more belly rubs.

So goodbye, Reddit. It was fun, until it wasn’t.