Sentimental in the sense that I have been a Reddit user for 16 years and this makes me feel really really old. And in internet years Reddit is even older, I would have excepted it to die already years ago and it seems exceptional that it has kept going for this long.

Back when Reddit was starting to get popular I was mildly annoyed and suspicious of it and all these other new fangled web2.0 things but slowly it replaced random forums, news groups, irc and other old school platforms for me. To me Reddit sits somewhere between those and the more modern and “social” web platforms and as such it feels like a relic from the early 2000s that probably has no place in the modern internet. Bit like me myself actually (“Hey, you should post that on Reddit!” is the usual ironic response that I get from my kids whenever I say something really funny or insightful…)

And like others here I’m worried about all the niche communities and losing the vast source of content that Reddit has accumulated. Sure, most of it is low effort shit as usual but especially with how bad Google has become Reddit is now my first choice when I need to get an overview of some new topic.

That said I have been planning to delete my Reddit account for a while now. After all these years it has got stale, the hive mind is predictable and it feels like I have seen all the same conversations and topics already too many times. I don’t need to read any threads on more popular subs since I already know what the most upvoted opinions, memes and jokes are going to be. And it seems like every few years they piss off their userbase in some way, who then threaten to quit and find something better and surely this the end of Reddit, and then nothing happens.

It’s old. I think it’s time to let it go now.