Why I Deleted My Reddit Account - I don’t like social media

Maybe I’m getting paranoid right now, or maybe I’m going into some sort of social media detox. After deleting my Facebook account some time ago and saying goodbye to Snapchat, I also deleted my reddit account. Why? That’s what I’m telling you here…

Over the last few months, I’ve learned a lot. Among other things, social media is designed to steal our time. To seduce us, to waste our time with nonsense that doesn’t make us any smarter, more experienced or otherwise better, instead of doing something that will help us progress. Social media doesn’t want us to spend our time wisely, it wants us to use the apps and websites and generate nice revenue for the companies behind them.

reddit is a social network like all the others, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter… there is no big difference. That’s why it has been on the list of accounts I would like to get rid of for a long time, especially since I haven’t used it regularly lately anyway.

Now there has been an update recently with new features that are supposed to lure you to reveal even more data, such as a new chat feature, and so on. The update arrived on my mobile phone in the morning on this day thanks to beta-program (I’m a beta junkie) and the thought came back if it makes sense to keep the account.

Finally, I decided to delete the account. reddit calls this deactivation, because the account does not disappear completely - contributions remain unaffected and the profile only shows that the account has been deleted. Since I also wanted to make my contributions disappear from the internet, I had to delete them all manually, a shitty task that shows how difficult the social networks are for users who decide to leave. Every lost user means some lost dollars.

But why do I delete all my accounts?

The reason is not that I hate all these companies behind the social networks, but rather I want to make sure that in 20 years (when I’m rich and famous) I or someone else suddenly discovers my posts from that time and I may be in difficult situations. I want to have more control over my content and decide what happens with it, and that includes not distributing my content everywhere.

With Twitter I’m still waiting, because after all the deleted accounts this is the only really effective way to win new readers (thanks, if you read this and maybe found this article on Twitter!). Actually, I would also like to say goodbye to them, because I don’t really like Twitter’s behaviour regarding current discussions, but I still hope that this company doesn’t go broke so fast (the profits don’t look so great…).

Frankly, I’m amazed at the people who managed to get rid of all this social media stuff and only use email etc., or never started with social media at all. The whole thing is more like a trap than it really enriches our lives.

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