I was a heavy user before, for sure. I used to scroll Reddit for hours a day. I uninstalled my app when the blackouts started. If I do a google search where the answer is on reddit, i'll still look at that answer. But for the most part, I am gone. Seems like a lot of people are all bark no bite though.
I reddit a LOT at work so I was probably spending roughly 3-4 hours a day with reddit at least in the background and I haven't actually intentionally visited the site for two weeks.
Honestly, my mental health is improving. Reddit is a shitty outrage machine that's astroturfed by corporations and fascists.
I open all of my apps by usings iOS search feature, i'll occasionally still type "apollo" and be like, "oh yeah, i dont have this anymore". It isn't as often now though, compared to the first few weeks.
If I do a google search where the answer is on reddit
This is what I'm missing the most, because I've learned to automatically add "reddit" to most of my searches, since I usually could find a better discussion there.
But now it's useless - if you need a product recommendation, it's filled with bots obviously schilling for whoever paid, fake reviews, and it's generally useless. And technical questions mostly lead to subreddits that were closed, and I have no idea what state are they in now - but I still don't want to give them traffic.
But what to do now? The internet is basically unusable by now. Everyone and now even AIs are writing blog posts or videos about things they barely understand, you have literaly thousands of AI generated pages about programming questions, some of them are outright wrong, and if you need something more complex than a single command - for example how to write a good video game AI architecture (especially this search term is FUCKED. I need to rewrite steerring, navigation and behaviors for a video game, but good luck searching for "video game AI" in the last few months...), most of the articles or tutorials are pretty shitty.
Every search term is filled with mediocre blog posts, usually copy-pasted between eachother. I literally don't know how to use the internet for deeply researching a topic anymore - everything is just barely scratching the surface in the most popularized way possible.