There But For The Grace Of RSS Go I

Man, it’s hard for me to believe that a year or so ago I was hooked on Reddit.

My current relationship with reddit is this: I get the RSS feed for Programming.reddit.com in my RSS reader. I find lots of interesting programming articles there. I virtually never read comments — I usually go straight to the linked page if the title interests me — and I never, ever upvote or downvote anything.

I never get annoyed because something is popular or unpopular, because I don’t know if anything is popular or unpopular, I just know it was in the feed.

I never get in arguments in the comments, because it would be a lot of trouble to click through to the comments, and I never bother.

I only read programming-related stuff, never politics. Ever.

This gives me what I always did enjoy out of Reddit — interesting articles on programming topics, that I might not see elsewhere.

Anyway…

Through some stray click I ended up at the Reddit home page today, and I was appalled that I had once devoted brain cells to this thing. Either it’s gotten worse over the past year or however long I’ve been avoiding it, or my tolerance for strident psycho nerds was once frighteningly high.

Jesus.