u/scrolling_scumbag

Or, Millennial re-discovers journaling?

You're allowed to just write something and not post it on Reddit or elsewhere online.

Maybe we've fallen into the modern attention trap of monetized social media and our default belief "they" push on us that sharing is good, which keeps us using and returning to these platforms. Maybe we stubbornly stick to the ideals of the old web, which dies a little bit more every day and is essentially irrelevant for how 99% of people use the internet.

When I invest effort into writing an essay, nearly all of the benefit is from the act of writing itself. It lets me organize and clarify my thoughts and develop new insights.

I get almost nothing in return for sharing it online. I don't respect the opinions of the average Redditor, so what do I care if they agree or disagree with me? If my post gets popular and gets several dozen comments, maybe one or two will actually be useful feedback (e.g. made me reconsider something I wrote, or introduces a new perspective). The rest of the replies are junk.

About a month ago I put effort into writing about a 1,000 word essay over on /r/nosurf. "The internet feels more barren every day, after 20 mins I'm already bored" was the title. My post was removed immediately, I think because I dared to mention "AI" in the essay and the AutoMod snagged it. The inactive mod never logged in to approve my post, so it just went into the void and nobody got to read it. And I realized I wasn't missing out on anything, I had already gotten what I needed to get out of it simply through the act of writing the piece.

I just laughed when I checked the new queue on /r/nosurf after my post was removed and saw it filled with astroturfing ads for vibecoded screentime apps and super low effort posts of like one or two sentences. Yet again we see AutoMod keyword removals mainly hurt actual humans, while the spammers get through on volume alone. Actually let's redux the title... "Wrote something? You may not be allowed to post it."

We (that being humans) are barely wanted here anymore. "They" need you to make their money, but they don't want you to have a voice. It seems the ideal Redditor user is someone who logs in several times throughout the day, silently scrolls and consumes their daily dose of bot slop and agitprop from "approved users", upvotes, maybe drops a couple pointless GIF replies or low-effort "this" comments...

Since then I've written several essays in my note taking app of choice, stuff I would normally post on Reddit, and I didn't. I just kept it private and offline. And I missed out on nothing, if anything I gained because I didn't feel obligated to log back into Reddit a few times that day and check for replies.

And yes, it will be very quirky, unique, and clever to respond something like "but you posted this on Reddit!" I'm not sure why I felt the need to share this one. Maybe I'm hoping to convince others of what I've come to see, and accelerate the death spiral of this site by removing what little remains of the human element.

Almost every time I get some smarmy reply, some dismissive asshole, some holier-than-thou Saint Redditor who thinks they're a god-given gift of "truth bombs" because their IQ test said 101 and they're now "above average"... it's a hidden profile user.

My thoughts on why asshole Redditors love hidden profiles:

• It hides that nearly every interaction they've entered into on this site is toxic, thus baiting some users into giving them the benefit of the doubt and engaging with them when they otherwise wouldn't have if they could see the comment history

• Users who need to be right all the time are protected from being called out for their wrong past predictions/comments by anyone in their communities other than mods

• They're into degenerate shit and love to argue, and got tired of (rightfully) getting shut down every time with "lol you post in furry diaper fetish subs"

Why are users with open and honest histories forced to interact with people using a feature almost universally adored by assholes and bad actors? If they want to hide, let me hide all their content, everywhere on Reddit. I shouldn't ever have to read posts or comments from hidden profile users, and they shouldn't be able to engage with any of my stuff.

A lot of subreddits focused on a product have this issue where 75% of the posts are just an image of the product or the box it comes it with no information, just [RECEIVED PRODUCT!]

However this subreddit takes it to another low, now it's just endless posts of screenshots of someone's receipt from their order? Like, come on, that is the lowest form of content. That is not the type of content that builds a long-term community. How do order screenshots encourage people to hang out here and discuss XTEInk products? They are just pointless spam that needs to be filtered out to find the actual content.

Personally I'd rather see way less posts in a subreddit, as long as all of them are people asking questions or sharing helpful tips, tricks, or info.

Anyway I'm out, thought I'd share why.

Almost every class, the people on the first ergs to the left and right that end up in the camera view have terrible form to the point where they look like they're going to injure themselves.

Recent Alex K row, the dude on the left was using his lower back to pull the whole length of the stroke, and the dude on the right was jerking his shoulders out of their sockets at the start of every drive. Recent Becs row, the woman on the right was pulling the handle up to her nose at the end of the stroke. There was an Ash row where both rowers in camera view are bending their legs before their arms on the recovery, raising the handle a solid foot above its normal trajectory on the recovery. Ash notices and spends a whole minute talking about avoiding "mountain tops", why this happens when you rush the recovery, and neither of them get it.

I know we should be watching the instructor and not the class attendees but this is so bad it's distracting, and now that I noticed it's a trend I look every class to see how the two people in camera view are rowing incorrectly. I also realize the rowing classes are a lot of people who couldn't get into cycling classes, or people who attended a cycling class and are just adding whatever other open classes there are that day. But when there's literally two attendees total in camera view next to the instructor the way the rowing studio is set up, I feel like they should at least make sure they're not first-time rowers.

You see some users claiming this every time a generalization is made about Redditors. "Redditors are dumber than the average person," "Redditors are maladjusted weirdos," "Reddit uniquely seems to attract mentally ill people."

All of these generalizations will usually be met with one or more users responding with a defense claiming that Reddit has become so popular that the average Redditor is representative of the average person, or at least average American.

Idk who or what these characters even are, whether they're from video games, anime, or some vtuber thing. But it seems like every time I click over to /r/all it doesn't take much scrolling to find softcore cartoon porn. Yesterday was some cartoon butt in a swimsuit with a cameltoe. And today was some busty cartoon woman with cleavage leaning over seductively. Every day you'll find several of these posts if you scroll /r/all enough, some of them depicting suspiciously underage-looking cartoon girls in a sexual way.

I assert that this is:

1. Not normal. The average male is not interested in cartoon porn, and far less women are.

2. Viewed as fucking creepy by the average person when considering the implied age of some of these subjects.

3. Probably a contributing factor to Reddit, Inc choosing to axe /r/all, so they can filter this stuff out from /r/popular, hide how fucking weird their users are, and try to attract more normies to the site.

When we stop errantly assuming that the average Redditor is representative of the average person, it actually makes Reddit as a social experiment far more interesting. Because rather than just taking a cup from the societal water barrel, this site seems to have installed a spigot on the bottom to siphon out a very high concentration of settled detritus. It seems like nearly every degenerate, freak, and weirdo has settled here on Reddit Dot Com at higher concentrations than the average population, and you certainly see it in the content and viewpoints expressed here.

I have many family and friends with dogs, who recognize and point out how annoying, misbehaved, and needy their dog is, then say something like "we're not getting another dog when Fluffy dies" or "this will be our last pet."

Most of them seem to get another one a year or so later. Do they forget how annoying the dog was? Lie to themselves about how they're going to train this one, then never do? Is it like an addiction for them to get the social clout and approval from other dog owners and they go into withdrawal? I've heard several creepy guys at work talk about how they like having dogs because the dog attracts women in public to them for a minute or so who otherwise wouldn't stop and chat.

Anyway, I know people who are on their third "last dog ever we swear" and it's just funny knowing how unlikely it is to be true.

This isn't a "wahhh I got banned" story, just an interesting data point in the continued decline and rot of Reddit, and a warning to anyone that actually cares about their account (not me).

I recently replied to a user that had a hidden profile and was explaining why they hid their profile. I used Reddit's own search feature with the "author:username" search to easily find that user's posts, not any third party tools or search engines. And I pasted several links of their past posts in reply to show them that they weren't as hidden as they thought they were.

Importantly, there was no comment or judgement made about the content of said links, I didn't make fun of or insult the user in any way, my comment was literally four Reddit links of posts they were the OP on, with a comment about how easy they were to find.

The user reported me, my comment was removed, and my Reddit account was suspended for one week. I appealed the ban to the Reddit admins, asking them to clarify:

> Just to be clear, linking to the posts of a hidden profile user that were found using Reddit's own search feature with no comment on the content is "harassment?" Is it harassment to link to an open profile user's posts?

Predictably, I got a reply in a couple hours that my ban would be upheld:

>We don't tolerate any behaviors that discourage others from participating in communities, conversations, or the Reddit platform through harassment, bullying, intimidation, sexualizing someone without their consent, or abuse.

Conclusion, harassment on Reddit is just whatever the user reporting you for harassment thinks it is, because there's no rule or guidance that says "you shall not find the posts a hidden user has tried to hide". We can additionally conclude that being able to search Reddit's built-in search for the posts of hidden profile users is not the intended function, however since this is not clarified anywhere, it's up to users to discover that they shouldn't do this and then get punished because Reddit's incompetent software team released a half-baked feature.

Importantly, also note these same report-happy users can abuse the report system and the block system to discourage others from participating on Reddit, but this is not harassment.

It feels like 75% of my comments lately on this site are calling out blatantly LLM-written comments or other forms of inauthentic astroturfing in the few subreddits I follow.

Not sure why I even bother. I'm one person, and there's thousands (and continuously growing amount) of bots. Even in the communities I follow that have banned LLM-written posts and self-promotion, the posts generally stay up for hours before the mods log in to deal with it. The spammer gets their exposure, even if they're banned they will just buy or spin up more Reddit accounts to continue filling this site with algorithmically generated text and trust-exploiting ads.

I think I detest the death of the human element on the internet so much, and I feel like I'm doing a part to fight back against it by calling out this stuff and reporting it. But I'm just one person. It seems like most Redditors are happy (or at least contentedly ignorant) to interact with LLM posts and guerrilla advertising. I'm wasting my effort in an asymmetric warfare environment, to the benefit of people that mostly don't recognize or appreciate the effort anyway. Playing "AI police" basically makes me a mini-mod but probably more of a loser since I don't have any real power to remove this stuff.

I have better things to do with my time. In the grand scheme of things, Reddit has probably already passed the tipping point of falling to AI. And even if it hasn't what will I, a single person, do to stem the tide? Delay it by all of 35 seconds after wasting hours of my personal time?

So here's my commitment:

1. I am done calling out people/bots who use LLMs to write comments.

2. I am done calling out astroturfers advertising their latest vibecoded app or whatever slop.

3. I will not even bother reporting these things to moderators. I am tired of engaging in free labor for communities that won't do basic things like add many more moderators in different time zones so someone is nearly always online to deal with reports before this LLM slop gains traction.

If I can stick to this commitment, it will drastically cut down the time I spend here. I need to get in the habit of closing the browser tab out of disgust when I see LLM slop on Reddit, rather than wasting more of my time calling it out.

We were told "April 2026" for T14 Gen 7 and T16 Gen 5 at MWC. Some EU markets have had a crack at these laptops for two weeks and they're still not released in the US.

X1 Carbon Gen 14 is released for a week or so in US, but with garbage last-gen CPU options and no Panther Lake in sight.

Today being the last day of April, looks like we're not hitting the claimed release window in the USA so what's next? Delay until mid-May? Delay beyond that to do a combo launch with the AMD lines?

I'm impatient and my 6 year old budget Acer is on its last legs so I'm considering buying something else. Framework 13 Pro with Panther Lake is backordered until September. Dell is garbage, forever and always. I utterly detest MacBook displays compared to Lenovo IPS, but I consider trying out the 2 week return policy on M5 Pro MacBook a little more every day.

It's gotten to the point where most of my comments on Reddit seem to be calling out blatant AI posts rather than actually engaging with any ideas.

This has just become so insufferable. A decade ago, who would have thought that a text-based forum would be the first major casualty of AI? In hindsight, LLMs are the perfect tool for turning Reddit into a bot hive while the generative image and video AI spends a couple more years perfecting being able to fool more than just boomers before fully claiming the other social platforms.

It's the same story everywhere on Reddit, some subs far worse than others. I know the mods on this sub are making an effort to remove AI-generated content and a post I reported and commented on yesterday calling out AI was removed after a few hours. But most users of this sub still engaged with it as if it was authentic prior to the removal.

The marketers are one thing, using LLMs to write a Reddit post, to advertise their shitty vibe-coded smartphone apps or browser extensions. Their rotten motivations are obvious.

The braindead people using AI to turn a couple sentences into an essay for them, or to "organize their thoughts" or to "clean up their writing" are another. And in a lot of subs, users defend it. Most people either don't know they're interacting with AI-generated content, or they don't care as long as it gives them their cheap dopamine hit.

The vast majority of writing is converging into a soup of AI slop. I feel like even people who don't use AI are subconsciously absorbing its writing structure, weird linguistic ticks, and repetitive turns of phrase, and throwing some of that in when they write things themselves. The result is this constant alertness every time I read something online, scanning for tells or hints that it might be AI slop.

I was going to write "honestly, it's exhausting" here but that seems like something a fucking LLM would say. But it is exhausting, I feel like I can't engage with any text anymore without running it through a mental filter of "does this text seem AI generated or not?" I can't even read any books written after the fall 2022 release of ChatGPT unless I know the author was an established writer prior to that point. Too many books by "new and upcoming authors" I've skimmed just sound like a collection of LLM output essays glued together; the constant attention changes and subchapters within chapters wherein each couple pages reads like a standalone essay is a dead giveaway. It's the same with internet blogs and articles, unless I've followed the author since prior to mass-market LLMs it seems like 80% of the newer writers I stumble upon are heavily using AI.

I thought this would make Reddit unbearable to me but it actually makes it interesting and addictive in a way, not because I want to engage in the AI content but because it's fascinating watching the masses of rubes fall for it, it's like those experiments where the researcher is working with the subjects, but unbeknownst to both of them there's another researcher hidden watching both of them. That's me, I don't know if I have some "special talent" for identifying LLM text but I think I'm pretty good at it. It's like a car crash in slow motion: we are watching in real time the complete and total death of trust and authenticity online, and likely the end of the "social internet" as humans know and have experienced it for two or three decades. I hate it, but it captivates me.