Karl Voit has stopped posting on Reddit

December 3, 2024

Every now and then an idea comes around and sticks in my mind for so long I can’t stop thinking about it. In this case, back on May 24, 2024, Karl Voit posted to r/emacs announcing he is leaving Reddit. This is not a new idea, but as time has gone on I find myself agreeing more and more with his sentiment.

Someone posted, How is emacs useful in practical life? in r/emacs, and although a valid question, it is so mundane. Almost rhetorical in nature, the question seems like it is baiting the reader, as anyone who spends time reading r/emacs uses emacs and is interested in learning more about it.

But this sort of general discussion question is to be frank, useless. It adds nothing to your life reading about it. The question starts off as:

I was on Discord and someone told me emacs is a monolithic text-editor and everyone uses VSCode now. I wasn’t even asking about whether it’s useful in the workforce but okay.

You were on Discord. There’s your first problem. Someone provided their opinion. It’s without merit. You don’t even need to really think too much about whether emacs is practical or not. The author goes on to mention three folks who create emacs content, Derek Taylor, Protesilaos Stavrou, and System Crafters. Yes there are people out there who can’t stop talking about emacs.

The larger question about this post lingers, who is this for? What value does it add to your life? Will it inform you? Is it worth your time to read through the 150 comments this post received?

Of course not. Suppose you have enough willpower not click through and read the Reddit post. It doesn’t matter because Reddit is not attracting quality contributions. It might be entertaining, but the algorithms used to curate your feed are based on popularity, not relevance. What captures your attention is not often informative.

And worse yet the more people use Reddit, the more it gets used for AI training data for better or worse. This is how we get suggestions to use Elmer’s glue to keep cheese from sliding off pizza:

To get the cheese to stick I recommend mixing about 1/8 cup of Elmer’s glue in with the sauce. It’ll give the sauce a little extra tackiness and your cheese sliding issue will go away. It’ll also add a little unique flavor. I like Elmer’s school glue, but any glue will work as long as it’s non-toxic. - u/fucksmith

Karl Voit brings up plenty of other good reasons unrelated to post quality, mostly around data access and being able to browse anonymously. Even myself I avoided downloading the app or using my account until the inability to just read Reddit became too difficult and I caved. I still end up reading Reddit as part of doing searches on Google or DuckDuckGo. There are a couple of subreddits I will seek out such as r/shittbattlestations or r/malelivingspace, but these subreddits aren’t engaging enough to distract me for too long. I don’t suggest cutting out Reddit 100%. We need not always be so hyper-efficient, but we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking scrolling through Reddit will reveal much useful information.