The orange alien and attention spans

In case you've been living under an extremely comfortable rock the past few months (where did you find such a comfy rock? I'm jealous...), you'll have picked on the fact that Reddit has opted to close their API. This killed pretty much all third party clients. When I heard the news, I rather quickly stopped using Reddit. Not even particularly out of protest, more because the official Reddit interfaces are utter garbage. My interfaces of choice were Slide on my phone and Teddit on the desktop. Truth be told, I mainly used Reddit as a time killing hole.

I should also mention that I'm not the type of person to generally post on social media, instead I mostly lurk -- that is if I touch the social medium in question in the first place. This is also the reason why I'm not on the Fediverse.

I also feel the need to point out how there were impressively widespread protests across the whole platform. I'm utterly baffled that they managed to do anything at all, even if they just annoyed the CEO a bit. I'm not used to seeing portions of the internet of this size come together to protest.

Other than that, all went pretty much as expected: a big company wants to make an utter shittonne of money rather than just a shittonne and thus decides to paywall parts of their platform. A pattern that we could've seen coming roughly the nanosecond the capitalist ghoul class took an interest in the internet.

What I didn't expect was me to replace the time I spent scrolling Reddit in search of dopamine with scouring obscure blogs; frequently on the Tor and i2p networks. I used to do it quite a lot before I found a Reddit client that I didn't hate.

Thing is that I don't think it's really done anything for my attention span. It's still as much of an ADHD addled mess as before. I still usually have three browser windows open; each with at least half a dozen tabs; each with a subtly different task and theme.

The biggest difference is that I have more fun scouring for my entertainment rather than boredly scrolling past a buffet of faintly interesting things, bumping into a gem (har har) roughly once every hour.

I wonder why that is... My guess would be that hunting for interesting things to read takes roughly the same amount of time, but I'm more engaged when on the "hunt"; even if the amount of time spent between two gems feels like it's roughly equivalent.

Come to think of it, reading might be the key word here. On Reddit, pictures largely rule the playground. On blogs -- at least the blogs I tend to come across -- you get at most one picture per post, the rest is all text.

With a bit of luck, if I keep up this habit, I might learn to read rather than skim. That would be nice...

Back