Welcome to My World

It just figures — the day I decide to quit reading Reddit[1], Google Reader manages to break so nobody can access the settings or “manage subscriptions” pages, so I can’t even yank the Reddit feed from my usual browsing method. Ugh. There are quite a few complaints about the problem on their help group, so I imagine this will get cleared up fairly soon.

In the meantime, the solution I’ve been relying on is just clicking that feed, then hitting “Mark all as read.” Heh. Close enough for me.

[1] Why bail on Reddit? Besides it turning into a general rabble-rousing political quagmire of useless ranting and raving (heh — there’s enough of that for my tastes right here on my site ), there’s no courtesy left there. I’ve been a dick here and there in the comments, too, so I’m even a part of the problem (which I’m solving by just unplugging), but it’s just not enjoyable, helpful or useful in any sense anymore. You get voted down if someone disagrees with you (especially if your opinion differs from the majority’s), even if you’re articulate and obviously not trolling in your posts. I’m not the first person to bail like this, though I won’t be posting any long-winded “goodbye” to the site directly. I’m just not in the mood for dealing with the same snarky responses this guy did when he submitted his “goodbye” to Reddit. The last person to reply to something I posted wrote a single-word reply to a question I asked him: “penis” … It’s time to go.

[Edit]: As Adam (the author of the “I’m Done with Reddit” piece) points out in a comment below, he didn’t actually submit the piece directly to Reddit; someone else did it, and he saw an unexpected spike in traffic to his site (and initially assumed his stat counters were broken). Ironically I thought the same thing when a random DDoS attack briefly hit my domain late last year — once I (and my webhost) blocked the offending netblocks, my stats sank back to their depressingly low levels

I did scroll through the Reddit comments related to that post, and did see lots of snark, but I must give a quick nod to the folks who did take it seriously and didn’t just hurl insults. Adam and I are certainly not the only people who feel it’s not worth visiting Reddit anymore, which is encouraging. Maybe they’ll do something to fix it, and a few months from now it might be enjoyable again. Maybe once a site like that becomes popular enough to go “mainstream” and get bought out, it automatically turns to crap. Who knows? There’s plenty of other spots out there to get my news fix (it strikes me as more “useful” to take in an actual random sampling of news from everywhere, from the friggin’ Christian Science Monitor (shudder) to the BBC).

[Edit 2]: Google has since corrected this issue; the settings page works again!

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