It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.
I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.
Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.
I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.
I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.
I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.
Algorithmically directed social medias such as Facebook are repulsive to me, so when I started using Reddit, I chose that place precisely because you could control what’s in your feed. It felt refreshingly different. Now Reddit is trying to become the next Facebook, so it’s pretty clear that it’s no longer the place for me.
The same thing seems to apply to the history of YouTube as well. Nowadays that site is trying to become just like TV, so perhaps sooner rather than later that site won’t be for me anymore.
This is why Apollo was the only thing keeping me on the site. I took advantage of its filters. I had an extensive list of keyword filters, and over the years had filtered probably several thousand subreddits. I could actually browse r/all and find interesting and unique new to me subreddits. It was great.
I solved that problem by using multireddits, and never visiting r/all. I had one for uplifting stuff, another one for science stuff and so on. In Narwhal and Slide, and they both made it possible to put multireddits in the center stage. Then I tried the default reddit app, and multireddits were hidden behind so many taps, that they must be about remove that feature soon.
I had multireddits for my subscriptions, but I liked discovering new things. With the extreme amount of trash filtering I did to r/all, it allowed me to discover interesting places I’d have never found on my own.
That is a good point. I would discover interesting new places when people specifically mention them. When someone did that, I would go to that sub, sort by top of all time and figure out if I actually care about that place or not. The trouble is, I didn’t bump into cool new subs very frequently.
Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles
I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise
I’ve also noticed that compartmentalizing my youtube experience has improved it significantly. For instance, science and technology will stay in one container, while scifi, anime, games, movies etc. goes into another container. It used to be possible to do this in Youtube by making dedicated lists of subscriptions. I used to have a list for all the computer stuff so that when I want to see computers, I would go there. When I felt like watching tea related contend, I would go to the tea list instead and I would se no computers at all. It was great… until YouTube decided to get rid of this feature.
Nowadays it’s just one big bess where the algorithm decides what you should watch today.