For me, it’s a few things.

  1. A way to burn time that doesn’t feel like a digital sugar rush.

  2. Support, camaraderie, and kindness, primarily from /r/stopdrinking.

  3. Niche stuff, like ideas for local hiking and backpacking trips, propaganda posters, and kayaking info.

  • Kasrean
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    13
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    1 year ago

    these are the main things I care about, until a reddit alternative can provide this I’m going to stay mostly or frequently on reddit.

    -somewhat reliable news headline feed from relatively neutral, serious center-right to center-left sources with little to no bad reporting/framing.
    -reliably hear about social trends, but with some distance to them
    -news discussion with some degree of different perspectives, some expertise, so it’s not just all left to the popularity of the headline.
    -discussion of movies and tv that is neither too fanboyish/popular leaning nor too indie/arthouse exclusive.
    -collections of helpful pro-consumer information and resources, up to date megaposts in hobby communities
    -a search function that will often enough lead to some helpful comments for most topics, googling “reddit xyz” was my go to for many years
    -feeds for some types of videos, like publicfreakout, livestream clips.
    -some communities that are more personal to me, like from my country or a political meme community, for venting and in-group discourse.
    -control over what i see in my feeds, most recommendation algorithms and trending tabs just don’t work for me
    -control over where I engage with content and in what form it’s presented, often I take a break from scrolling social media except for seeing some top posts in my rss feed. at some point I just want AI to read out summaries of all that stuff to me and actually visit website interfaces way less often myself.

    • @ewe
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      111 year ago

      -reliably hear about social trends, but with some distance to them

      This is an astute point that I didn’t really think about. Not being on other social media sites like facebook or twitter, and also lacking a water cooler to chat at work (I’m WFH), I can go days without hearing offhand comments about a popular culture phenomenon. I don’t necessarily want to be “in it” but I do want to at least know about trends.

      These are all pretty much on the top of my list as well.