SHERIDAN: I am a recovering reddit addict
I went cold turkey Monday night.
I’m not kicking a smoking habit, and I’m not pulling myself out of a deep dependency on illicit chemical substances.
Instead, I'm in the throes of withdrawal from a new kind of gateway addiction.
I quit reddit.
The popular online listing that organizes user-submitted links by a simple “cream rises to the top” model of up- and downvoting had already sapped dozens of productive hours.
“I’ll get to work on that blog post in just a bit,” I would say. “Just after I read this poorly-drawn comic about a guy getting really mad at a video game.”
This happened more times than I care to admit in the three or four months since I regularly began browsing its shifting troves of time-wasting treasures.
There’s nothing wrong with the website, and my decision to drop it like a Friday morning class is by no means a snipe at its value.
It’s a great way to see what’s influential online and what could very likely be on the news in a few days, from adorable animals to exposés on corrupt government officials.
In fact, I began “redditing” as a source for potential story ideas during my tenure as managing editor at CM Life in spring semester. But it quickly began to dominate my time online.
Something about the constantly-changing front page selection and the allure of discovering the next amazing, exciting or bizarre bit of content to share with my social networks kept me checking in for extended periods at least every couple of hours.
A pathological need to browse reddit was certainly not the only thing keeping me from taking advantage of the quiet summer months to bolster my blogging — and do the dishes — but it was one habit I knew I could stand to kick.
So a quick edit of the host file in my computer’s Windows directory left me with a quiet redirect to WordPress, my blog platform of choice, just in case I fall off the wagon and punch in “reddit.com.”
Looks like I’m all ready to get to work now, but I’d better check Twitter first.
