24 hours of Reddit: 597 stories! I gotta cut back.

I didn't go to reddit for a full 24 hours. from 11pm EST Jan 7 - 11pm EST Jan 7. But I did have a blog reader set up to track the stories. Here's a screen shot at the end of the self-imposed reddit denial:


Five hundred ninety seven stories in about 24 hours. In real-time during waking hours, that's about one every two minutes, but they come batches.

There's no way I could look at even 10% of that content. There's no way I could even evaluate which 10% I should look at. I doubt anyone could, except qgyh2.

This explains why I had the frequent compulsion to switch to a reddit tab and reload the page to see what was new, because every couple minutes something was new. And I clicked on it not because it was interesting or informative, but only because it was new. Fellow redditors, this takes up more of your time than you think it does.

That's going to stop. I need a better way to keep up with the intertubes and the world. Something that makes better use of my limited time.

I haven't yet decided whether or not to abandon reddit.

Why did I track reddit in Reader? I felt that reddit was taking up too much of my time, and wanted to free up some of that time without giving up my "reddit fix." I thought that if I used a reader to track the stories, I could skip the comments and just read the submitted content. (Yes, I know comments are the best part of reddit)

When setting this up, I realized I was subscribed to a lot of rubreddits. I unsubbed from many of them and kept the ones I decided I wanted. There are others not shown in the screenshot. The 'scifi' subreddit, for example, didn't have any new posts on its front page that day.

I did all that setup on Sunday. On Monday, my reader was busy, busy, busy. It always had "new unread messages" I kept marking them as read without even reading them -- there were just so many and I was busy doing, well, work.

On Tuesday, I just let the reddit folders fill up with unread messages, and at the end of that is where I took the screenshot.