The Universe is a big place, so it almost certain.
But so far we don't have compelling enough evidence to verify this.
I still subscribe to a couple of niche subreddits because their lemmy equivalents haven't taken off yet. But aside from the occasional check-in, I don't really visit any more. Amazed at how much time I wasted each day on nothing.
The level of research is evident---Tim Powers doesn't skimp on the details at all. I normally don't like espionage thrillers but he makes the Great Game come alive. And that's before the weirder elements come in.
I'm finally reading Declare by Tim Powers. All I can say is holy shit I never knew how much I needed this book in my life.
I think we underestimated the influence that FOMO exerts on people. Despite my very principled stand to leave Reddit forever, I found myself checking in periodically to monitor the zeitgeist---and feeling crushingly disappointed that so few people actually care about anything but content. Or worse, blaming the unpaid volunteer mods for inconveniencing them.
Speaking for myself, it's going to be some time before I get that site fully out of my system. But the attitude of the Reddit community itself is incentive enough for me to stay away.
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If they gave in on day one or two, I may have stuck around.
But as it stands, a week without Reddit has effectively broken my addiction. I've already uninstalled Sync from my phone, deleted my comments, and I only see Reddit pages when they show up as relevant search results.
So they could reverse direction tomorrow and I would be indifferent at best.
Since I left Reddit, I've had a few searches yield very helpful Reddit results. I read them and move on. I'm running an adblocker and I'm not providing value by commenting. I see no problem with this.
@johndroid
@lemmy.world