So I’m pretty sure most of you guys also came from reddit. Or at least, a majority of you did. So I think you all understand how addictive it can be. I’m not going to lie, in the past few years I really liked to go up every now and then to troll stupid and harmful people. But lately, I realised it’s all a waste of time because it’s not like I can actually hurt them - I mean I did manage to hurt them but only because they were dumb enough, but it’s not like I can actually “”act upon my judgement”” or any other cringe thing an edgelord can think about. But yeah, I’ve grown tired of negativity, and I want to be a… wholesome person, I think. But sometimes when relaxing, I get the urge to hop back on Reddit to troll some people just because, which I don’t want. I mean don’t misunderstand me, I didn’t entirely gave up on Reddit bc I still have an account there and I do go up if I want to see gaming shit or anything related to my niche interest, I’m just avoiding some specific subreddits. So what should I do? Does anyone else have similar feelings as I do?
Interrupt your habits.
- Uninstall the app, if you use that.
- Log out in your browser.
- If you use ublockorigin, add reddit.com to the custom block list
- Use a password manager, change your password to something you can’t remember. Then in your password manager, put a prefix on it like
(take-a-break), so you have to go through the hassle of editing it to log in.
You don’t need to be up to the minute or even the day for most of your interests, you can catch up when you have time to do so intentionally.
Interruptions cause you to slow down and give your will power a moment to catch up and intervene.
The next time you feel the urge to browse reddit:
- Go to imgur and browse the category aww
- Spend a few minutes looking at cute dogs and cats
- Carry on with your day, and be proud of yourself that you did not go on reddit.
Bonus link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOqb_UzJSUQ
Switch to Lemmy - it’s working for me. I like the UI much better.
I was in a similar position to you. I had 500k karma iirc and I was legit addicted.
Delete your account. That’s what I did. It was unthinkable and honestly kind of painful but looking back I’m so glad that I did. Rip the bandaid off and you’ll never really have a reason to go back.
Find a Lemmy app that you like (or mbin or kbin, they all serve the same content (kinda)) and just use that.
Lemmy has far less content so when you run out of things to look at, realize that that is the addiction and try to do anything else.
When commenting, try and remember that you’re (probably) responding to a real human and don’t be an asshole. Admittedly I’m not always great about this but have made a lot of progress in the right direction.
Try not to get involved in the inter-instance drama. It isn’t worth your time.
Its a process. You’re going to find what works for you. You’ll probably fail a bunch too but life is about getting back up when you fail so just keep at it and you can make meaningful change if you want to.
I have a userscript that sets display = ‘none’ for urls matching reddit to remind myself to stay off reddit for a while. I adjusted it a little to support blocking only specific subreddits like you seem to want to do, maybe it will be useful to someone: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/520007-disableredditbysub
