Wither Reddit

Reddit is currently one of the most popular websites on the internet, well within the top ten sites listed on the list of most-visited websites on Wikipedia. It has changed a lot since it was launched in 2005, becoming much more mainstream. Many people indeed associate Reddit with mainstream content where people post funny/popular links/images/“memes”/videos and try to be witty. Perhaps such content really gained traction with the 2010 mass exodus from Digg, where such content was previously popular. It is also popular for talking about politics and writing about social issues (with accompanying pictures of food). For many people, however, the value of Reddit is in niche communities. Reddit provides forums for discussion as well as news aggregation.

Reddit has had a number of controversies. On one hand, it is impossible to please everybody. On the other hand, corporate incentives may not align with the interests of small communities, especially now that Reddit is a publicly-traded company. Many technical communities left Reddit during the Reddit API controversy in 2023, either hosting their own forum software or communicating on the Fediverse. Many non-technical communities remained, however. I still get a lot of value from Reddit, the vast majority of which is from such non-technical local communities.

I primarily consume Reddit via RSS, which allows me to quickly process every post to the communities that I follow, in a non-distracting user interface. Unfortunately, Reddit has announced that they are stopping RSS feeds on November 13.

What are the alternatives? I quite dislike the Reddit website. It has a very poor user interface for my purposes. The infinite scrolling likely serves Reddit corporate incentives, however, as it encourages addiction. Addiction may bring income to shareholders, but it also results in doomscrolling and brain rot.

I was able to avoid using the terrible Reddit website for a long time because they also provided an older web interface at old.reddit.com. While I do not think that the old interface was particularly attractive, I think that it was much better than the current website. Unfortunately, Reddit started requiring users to login to use it, and you now have to login within every six months to keep access.

The Reddit app (for mobile phones) is even worse than the Reddit website. FWIW, I prefer RedReader, an open-source client with a focus on accessibility. It is a better way to (doom)scroll through content, but it does not help replace RSS.

For people like me, the value of Reddit plummets on November 13th. I am under no illusion that Reddit cares, as they make money off of the millions of mainstream users who do not use RSS. Online communities have been around for a long time, predating Reddit and even the web itself. I hope that we have better platforms for communities in the future, even if social media is leading us into a dry spell.