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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

I added reddit.com to uBlock Origin's filters list. I can still visit it, but there's now a screen asking me if I'm sure I want to go there. It's stopped me a few times, and it's breaking that muscle memory of "pick up phone & check reddit/etc"

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A few years back, I realised how bad the addiction was when I deleted a couple of apps. While doing other things on my phone, I'd autopilot going to the apps list and tapping the empty space where Reddit/Twitter used to be. You're right, that little bit of friction is enough to make you stop and ask "what am I really getting out of this?"

Reddit has gotten so bad over the last decade that I've stopped browsing it altogether, except for one or two niche subreddits every now and then.

I am really hoping they kill old.reddit.com so I can finally cut it off completely.

Every god damn subreddit gets infested with political content it's hard to browse. And even if you want to get more niche in depth content, most of the time subreddits will be filled with extremely beginner, basic questions.

Something simpler that has helped me break off some websites is to just log out. Twitter and Facebook have no feed if you log out. Reddit on the opposite will show you an empty feed if you're logged in but follow no subreddit. YouTube does neither, but I like long videos so it's unlikely I mindlessly open one.

Google+ is still part of my muscle memory. It was such a pleasant place when they stopped mandating people use it.

I'm not familiar with how those filter lists work. What do I have to enter to get a screen like this?

What about the app?

I have never installed it.

I prefer to access things through a web browser.

I actually found that certain browser equivalents of attention sucking apps were poor quality enough that using them only through the browser was enough friction to wean myself off them. old.reddit.com is especially badly optimised for anything other than a desktop screen.

For me, it’s that I have a million keyword and subreddit filters on my desktop computer and Reddit is unreadable for me without those filters, so I never read it on my phone

Old.reddit.com is the only way reddit loads on my se2. The actual mobile website just times out with half the comments loaded every time. A lot of noticeable lag. It is a super heavy site in comparison with old.reddit.com.

The reddit app is so bad, it may actually have been designed to end addiction to reddit.

It literally cannot be worse than the website. Reddit has always sucked except for that brief period between the creation of the new UI and the enshittification of the new UI. I never used the old UI before because it was so bland and there were so many better alternative UIs.

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