After experiment with returning to Twitter I decided to make another one.

I asked myself a question: where can I get useful content or at least increase its proportion to usual scrolling? Maybe service which I often use instead of google when I want real human opinions?

Of course, Reddit is already not the same as before. Real human opinions sit next to AI slop, bots, adverts and other stuff. But for some subreddits it could work.

Some history: I already regularly checked top posts of some subreddits every month: Lego, metroidvania, PICO-8, some professional and a few others. Some of them like LEGO were just for cool things, others like blues rock and PICO-8 made me really good recommendations.

And then I thought - maybe there are good posts besides top, like in daily feed. Maybe Reddit algorithm is better. And I logged in to my account and started subscribing to subreddits. Then I downloaded an app, because fuck Reddit they have an aggressive defense against scrolling from mobile web.

Ok, subscribed to my monthly subreddits, added some new ones. And the best first impression was from stoner rock subreddit – many new and good recommendations. Cozygamers was good too, because at that time I certainly wanted something like it.

Reddit started to flood me with Balkan subs (by location), Russian subs (country or language), movie subs (because searched). And at that point I finally realized that Reddit is far too aggressive with recommendations. Searched for some question about “Obsession” movie – and now my feed is bloated with three different Obsession subreddits and multiple cinema ones. Or, you subscribed to one of popular subs? Now you’ll never see your niche ones (ok, one post in the feed, good?).

Ignores work well, or at least better than on Instagram – they really never occur again in the feed. But any interaction outside your subs – and you’re automatically assumed to be deeply interested in all aspects of this topic. And every time Reddit tries to please you, the feed gets less interesting and more boring. So algorithm is bad too, it takes too much manual curation.

And I can’t read only non-algorithmic chronological feed, because there are too many posts.

And so I deleted the app and started to use only the web version from laptop. For now it’s good. But I think it goes the same way as other social networks. In the end, maybe I’ll just expand my monthly top list and start checking multiple pages. It’s still a working solution.