{"id":4468,"date":"2026-08-25T12:12:01","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T18:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/?p=4468"},"modified":"2026-08-25T12:12:01","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T18:12:01","slug":"saying-goodbye-to-reddit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/2026\/08\/25\/saying-goodbye-to-reddit\/","title":{"rendered":"Saying goodbye to Reddit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Irene’s profile picture on Reddit.<\/p><\/div>\n

On September 12, 2026, my Reddit account will be 20 years old. It might be time to say goodbye.<\/p>\n

When I first joined Reddit, it was a great way to get news from a variety of sources and to broaden my horizons. Having the ability to comment and ask questions helped to build a sense of community for me. I mainly stuck to the subreddits I was interested in, such as Formula 1, technology, privacy, etc., and there was a sense that someone on the other end of the internet was conversing with you.<\/p>\n

Reddit has also always had darker corners (massive understatement) and I\u2019ve stayed away from them. Like the internet in general I know of those dark corners, but choose to not peruse them. Some of those darker subreddits I didn\u2019t even know existed until they became national news. I stuck to the things that interested me and could provide me knowledge.<\/p>\n

The past couple of years, however, has given me great pause about Reddit, what it is, and if I should even stay. After Reddit decided to charge for access to its API (application programming interface)<\/a> in 2023, I greatly reduced my usage on the site. In the simplest terms, the API is what allows your app to connect to a site.<\/p>\n

The price for the API was so high, basically the official Reddit app is all there is if you want to surf via your phone. More than 7,000 subreddits \u201cwent black\u201d in protest. Nearly all the ones I subscribed to went black. Reddit didn\u2019t budge.<\/p>\n

It was quite noticeable soon after how things had changed. The moderators relied on useful bots for moderation to keep garbage out. The vast majority of those are gone. I greatly reduced my usage on the site. This wasn\u2019t because I surf Reddit on my phone. I\u2019ve always visited Reddit on my desktop. It just felt…wrong. I understand Reddit needs to make money, but their licensing demands for their API were absolutely ridiculous. And things there felt different. Still, I held out hope things would settle down and get better.<\/p>\n

Slowly, I started seeing more garbage posts. Duplicate posts appeared. Actually, duplicate would be an understatement. Now, in the Formula 1 subreddit, there are often 5-7 posts of the same article. The useful bots used to immediately catch these. Now, hours later, posts are still there, cluttering any useful information.<\/p>\n

There were also other things already bothering me, including one of the co-founders, Steve Huffman, known as spez, was a huge Trump supporter and had admitted that he personally went in and manipulated posts across Reddit (insert obligatory fuck u\/spez comment), including changing what a person wrote.<\/p>\n

In an effort to continue to minimize my time online and use my time more wisely, I started surfing Reddit not logged in. This allowed me to momentarily yell at my screen and not comment. Thus, I was avoiding those internet arguments that weren\u2019t worth it anyway. Those arguments are more and more with malicious bots anyway. All it does it make me angry. Problem solved. Or so I thought.<\/p>\n

At the end of June 2026, Reddit made another announcement<\/a>. They were starting to roll out a new rule. If you surf the site via old.reddit.com, you had a short time left before you would be required to log in to see the site this way.<\/p>\n

Old.reddit is how I surf the site. \u201cNew\u201d reddit (www.reddit.com) is an unusable mess. Old.reddit is closer to how the site was until around 2017. It\u2019s streamlined. It isn\u2019t what the owners want. They\u2019re within their rights to change it however they want. I\u2019m within my rights to leave.<\/p>\n

Little things on old.reddit started breaking down, not quite working like it did. It\u2019s the nudge to move off old.reddit. It\u2019s not enough of a bother for me to do so because, as I said before, I hate the redesign. Reddit is only helping me to achieve my goals sooner.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

During the Covid lockdown, fans learned of Formula 1 Driver Clarles Leclerc’s love of the banana skin in the game Fortnite. A fan sent him a banana suit, which he happily wore during live streaming<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s another lingering problem for me and that is the increase in bots, bot posts, and the destruction of what community I once felt there.<\/p>\n

For example, the constant bitching about everything in the Formula 1 subreddit and the misogyny and casual racism has made it place I don\u2019t want to be. The moderators can\u2019t keep up and it falls to the users to vote those kinds of things down. It doesn\u2019t really help and it made me not want to be on the site at all. It\u2019s not just the Formula 1 subreddit. It\u2019s happening sitewide.<\/p>\n

Some will argue these problems have always existed on Reddit and they would be right, but they were always to a much lesser degree. They were manageable. Long discussions could still be had. Reddit was still a place for useful information. It was a community. Now, I don\u2019t even like going there anymore.<\/p>\n

Most subreddits have become echo chambers of what they once were. Others are more extreme and, if you make a comment in another subreddit, they ban you in theirs because they don\u2019t like that other place. Worse than banning is the shadowbanning. You can still post, but your comment is never seen by anyone other than you. Many subreddits have no appeal process, you\u2019re just shit out of luck. Oh, and if you swear? Ban. Can\u2019t say fuck in a subreddit and they find out you did in another subreddit? Well, that\u2019s a ban, too. Fuck that schoolyard bullshit.<\/p>\n

Reddit has become a place that makes me angry. Even an innocent niche subreddit, such as lynxes, makes me mad from the repeated posts of the same pictures or the same pictures cropped.<\/p>\n

The site, in general, is a community of communities and you can pick and choose where you want to hang out. The problem is, it\u2019s become a bitter version of itself which stokes fear and anger. Mostly anger for me. A recent study<\/a> has found that I\u2019m not imagining it.<\/p>\n

We found that the entire website of Reddit has become more negative over time. Moreover, the longer a given community exists, the more negative it becomes \u2014 and the longer a comment thread continues, the more negative the thread becomes. This is the first time someone has shown that, so that\u2019s a finding in and of itself. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There isn\u2019t a randomness to the site anymore. There are no more legendary comments, which are talked about site-wide for months. Most new users have no idea who Unidan<\/a> was or what he did<\/a>, nor do they know the contributions Victoria<\/a> made to the site.<\/p>\n

Everything that was once good about Reddit has slowly been removed. There is a part of me that suspects this is deliberate. After all, once you take your business public, shareholders want to see growth and a return on their investment. So businesses focus on money instead of what made their product great.<\/p>\n

Now, you get to deal with random locked or deleted posts because of their new moderation tools<\/a>, which suck because they aren’t human. Some popular posts disappear in a few hours, victims of the all mighty algorithm and its need to constantly churn out garbage. What you end up with is slop bot accounts that create repeat posts that can get through the moderation tools. You also have other AI slop, propaganda, and political bullshit disguised as new content to consume.<\/p>\n

The reasoning behind the latest old.reddit login push is that bots are scraping the site for information to feed to other AI bots. Okay, but you let that happen by, essentially, banning all the good bots that were already combating it and allowing users to hide their posting history. Also, if you ban a bot account, another will be created soon after. What it comes down to is money. Reddit isn\u2019t making money off old.reddit and the bot issue is a convenient excuse.<\/p>\n

Many websites are getting hit hard with large language models (LLM) scraping their sites. When you do a search online, their LLM has a summary, which people read and then never visit the website. Studies are showing these sites are losing around 75% of their traffic. I get it. But when you\u2019re also making your site shittier for the consumer, the humans are going to get fed up and leave. I\u2019m tired of fighting the algorithms.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not convinced old.reddit will be shut off. The newer part of reddit will just be \u201cimproved\u201d in some way, which will continue to break old.reddit, which will continue its slow death march.<\/p>\n

Will I delete my account? I don\u2019t know. Twenty years is a lot of time to invest in a place, but if I can\u2019t surf the site without logging in, there is no point in visiting. If they delete old.reddit completely, I\u2019ll never go back.<\/p>\n

The community is already gone. Users make the site. Good luck, Reddit. Your site is shit now. And good luck to the rest of us humans. The independent web is dying as well. Cherish silly places like this website and the informative ones like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive while you can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On September 12, 2026, my Reddit account will be 20 years old. It might be time to say goodbye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[190,219,467],"class_list":["post-4468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ramblings","tag-internet","tag-life","tag-reddit"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4472,"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468\/revisions\/4472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irenenorth.com\/writings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}