Reddit – A Scott Odyssey

It would be easy for me to say I’m leaving Twitter because of the new owner. The reality is that is just background noise and just nonsensical to me. I have talked about leaving social media for a while. I’ve deleted my Facebook account and recreated it at least once. A few years ago I wrote how I didn’t really post on Twitter. I previously used Twitter to get real time information during a few weather related incidents. And also during a bomb scare in Times Square. That at the time had some value to me and was why partly why I kept it. The other reason i kept Twitter around was I would automatically send blog post links to Twitter when I posted on WordPress. The intention was to radiate to friends when i posted.

In recent years I have not used Twitter for any real time searches for anything. I could do searches like that without an account anyway. I simply get no value out of the service. The shenanigans going with the platform now might have reminded me of that fact.

The final trigger was that when I looked at the analytics on my blog for all the referrals I get to my blog from Twitter I noticed that this year I got a whopping 13. That number throws out any notion that keeping Twitter is helping to direct friends and family to my blog posts. With that revelation on top of generally not getting any joy or value out of the service it made no sense to keep it.

It is not just Twitter that i have closed accounts for. I previously wrote about using Redding for several sub reddits that were useful to me. Compared to Twitter I did find value in Reddit. Then I read you could run or use a front end to Reddit that does not require you to logon to their website. That way i can read (its all i do) sub-reddits without an account anonymously. Having an account was just a way for Reddit to collect data on me. Now i use my own URL to query the groups i want to search Reddit with and the site has no analytics on me.

The same thing I do with Reddit i do a similar thing with YouTube. No Google account tracking for me thank you.

Both the Reddit & YouTube front ends i use are my own instances i have on a VPS. I have a new one for Twitter also however i do not know if i will use it as much as i do with the Reddit and YouTube ones.

In my part 1 of My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 i outlined my objectives with assessing my use case of each social media platform I use. Part 2 covered Twitter. Part 3 covers Reddit. Yup i started reading some stuff on Reddit.

I started using Reddit in 2019. I broke down and signed up. I haven’t posted anything. I joined a few sub-Reddit’s. That in and of itself helps build a profile on me and what I like and read. I am not a fan of that. I do find following along in each community I find informative. It is targeted discussions and some of them have been useful. That value however comes at the price of Reddit knows I am interested in specific things. For now I am not really sure if my lurking there for some information is worth that model on what i am interested in. For now I am paying that price.

I may just cancel my account and have direct links to some sub-Reddit’s i want to read. Then i could try to use a TOR Browser on VPN to just read without having the linkage to me. That work around does require much more effort to do so not sure if the cost benifit is worth it.

In the end I think I “should” delete Redit. That being said the cost “i think” for keeping it is low compared to other providers so I am neutral on it, for now.