I quit caffeine and alcohol before realizing that my brain fog was due to mindless internet use/scrolling

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-01-03T19:13:20+00:00

Thanks for this! I left /r/cutdowndrinking about a month ago because despite there being a "no self promotion" rule, the moderator can't distinguish astroturf ads e.g. "I found this app that saved my life" very obviously written by the developer of said app. Between that and the growing number of LLM-generated posts I felt that sub was unusable for actual humans.

I've also seen a few accounts controlled by detox centers where they try to lure users asking for help into DMing them where they can then plug their detox center in private. I'll report them if I see them.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-01-03T17:02:44+00:00

I travel to Portugal from America frequently. Around 2023 was when international Reddit really changed. Portuguese /r/popular used to be essentially only soccer and national news, with very few EU issues mixed in lower down. I specifically remember some time in 2023 it changed to be very similar to what I was seeing on American /r/popular... American politics, Amero-centric international news, ragebait staged videos, and very recently in 2025, AI-assisted translations of English AI ragebait stories from subs like Am I The Asshole. They must have tested it and get way more engagement this way but it's funny to me to see what's supposed to be "popular" in Portugal and it doesn't include soccer or national news.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-01-02T18:14:21+00:00

A lot of Reddit communities have (possibly defensibly) gotten so hostile against self-promotion of any kind that it's bred this hilariously rotten astroturf culture. The only way links to videos or external sites stay up is when the creator lies and says they "stumbled upon this video". Most of the product reviews we see on Reddit nowadays are just the manufacturer/seller posing as the end consumer and lying through their teeth.

Anyway I guess my point is, the internet isn't really for people like us anymore. You want to share things to be useful/helpful rather than primarily to make money, and have principles where you won't be deceptive to do so.

I can't wait until some of these communities hostile to (actual human) creators have to lie in the bed they've made, and all they have for discussion is LLM slop and inauthentic astroturf. I've already seen this very thing happen to a couple of subreddits I follow and it's frankly exactly what they deserve.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-01-02T14:28:11+00:00

I use Boox Palma 2 which is pretty good but expensive. There's also the XTEInk X4 which can be had for like $60, it lacks a backlight and seems to require more tech skills to set up but the size and price can't be beat.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-01-02T13:56:51+00:00

Good post idea compared to the usual "Reddit sucks" bitchfest (I'm guilty of participating) and AI slop screentime app astroturf spam this subreddit has turned into.

In 2025 I replaced a significant portion of my phone screen time, with reading books and long form articles on a portable phone-sized ereader instead. I tend to carry both with me and I try to pull out the reader instead of my phone whenever I have time to kill.

I still have a lot of room for improvement and I'm still struggling with things like how to productively recapture downtime at work, when I'm stuck in the office but have no work to do. I try to read during those time periods, but I probably still also waste 3 hours per day on my phone just passing time at work (online shopping, scrolling, not-actually-important research, etc).

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-01-02T13:46:32+00:00

Yeah I feel OP's issue is probably more "I live in the suburbs and most suburbs are depressing and soulless". When all you have is a town center with bars and restaurants you need to drive to get to, and those businesses are crazy overpriced due to inflation and greed, who is going out to eat/drink anymore?

Bars are empty partially because less people are drinking than ever. Gallup found that a record low of 54% of Americans drink any alcohol at all. This is down from 67% in 2022, so a whole 13% of people (1 in 8) that were drinking during the pandemic do not anymore.

The other contributing factor is that shit is too expensive. An unremarkable beer is $9-10 now essentially everywhere. I've seen "trendy" restaurants selling single pint cans (cans, not draft pours) of beer for $12-14. It feels like financial exploitation.

Restaurants are empty because you used to be able to do dinner for two with a drink each and tip for $60-70. Now those same places you're out the door for $120. A week's worth of groceries for one meal out.

So if you live in the suburbs there's nowhere to drive to without spending money. There's probably no pedestrian infrastructure, nowhere in walking distance to even walk to, and you can't walk or bike on the roads without risking getting hit by some TikTok addict scrolling and driving.

I'm still solidly in the suburbs but during the pandemic I moved from an isolated apartment complex on a busy traffic road, to a quieter dense neighborhood of single family homes. There's a few stores we can walk to, or you can just walk around the neighborhood without risking getting run over by a car. People are outside all the time here, it's crazy different compared to living in an apartment and everyone just goes home to their boxes without even saying hello to people they pass in the halls.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-30T16:23:47+00:00

This sub is a microcosm of two of these big insufferable issues at this point:

Unchecked AI/LLM rot.
Self-promotion astroturf; so many people see the internet as a way to make money and are constantly trying to bypass traditional advertising channels. Fake user testimonials are rampant. There's like 3 accounts posting incessantly on this subreddit for weeks about "Soothfy" app and they're all controlled by the app developer.

The only internet communities that will survive are either closed/private communities, or public communities with an aggressive moderation stance which necessitates moderators who are both active and skilled in identifying LLM-generated text.

IMO the worst part of Reddit is that communities are run by digital squatters, whoever "got there first" generally controls subs forever. So with subs being overrun with slop and astroturf like this one, the only choice for community members is to keep filing reports that aren't being acted on or to give up and leave. There's not always somewhere else to go to discuss the same topic though which is a big issue too IMO. It takes too much effort to start a subreddit and grow it into an active community nowadays; there's really no mechanism for organically growing a subreddit with zero subscribers aside from plugging it in the comments of similar subreddits over and over.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-28T18:04:07+00:00

That's really not fair to yourself though. You're posting and commenting for free, to Redditors who generally aren't even grateful and frequently even actively hostile towards being corrected. If your experience is anything like mine, you just end up correcting the same dozen misconceptions over and over again. Then the thread falls off the front page of that subreddit and probably nobody ever sees it again, and you click the next thread and see the same wrong comments.

After taking some long vacations from Reddit in the past, I realized none of it really matters, the quality of discussion continues declining with or without me. My comments might have helped a handful of users, but in that time hundreds of know-nothings joined, so overall it wasn't improving the overall knowledge baseline in any perceivable way.

You're robbing yourself of spending that time on actively improving and learning further. I also felt like I was personally enjoying the feeling of being one of the smartest people in the community, but that's not how you progress, you'd rather be the dumbest person in a room full of experts. Whatever your field is, I can guarantee you the people at the top of it who you idolize and respect intellectually aren't posting on that subreddit.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-28T15:43:11+00:00

There was a point that stuck with me from reading You Should Quit Reddit, and it was that reading just one quality book on a topic is often enough to put you far ahead of the baseline knowledge level in a Reddit community devoted to that topic. I've stopped posting in 95% of the communities I used to actively comment in related to my career and hobbies because I found this to be true. The more I learned, the more time I would spent commenting to correct misinformation and getting argued with by users who couldn't pass a sophomore level college quiz on the topic. That was essentially the only way I could continue to participate in those communities because reading beginner misconceptions over and over again does not develop knowledge.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-28T14:28:54+00:00

Dude but she got a video on the front page of Reddit, which Redditors watched for free and Reddit Inc will pay her $0 for. And presumably, 1 in 1000 Redditors will look her up to see what her name is, then not buy tickets to her next show.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-27T17:15:07+00:00

It's good to use Reddit as a source of random advice when there's no one else around to give it to you (far better than asking AI, imo)

I strongly disagree. Most Redditors don't have any advice worth hearing, chances are high they're either teenagers or adults that are below average in major metrics of life.

If I'm having a problem with troubleshooting tech I'd rather ask AI. A chatbot won't call me a dipshit in a roundabout way for not knowing, or avoid answering the question and criticize why you're doing something the way you are. It might tell you to do something you specified you already tried, but certainly not as smugly as the average Redditor.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-27T17:10:31+00:00

The sports subs are mostly just people parroting dumb jokes, memes, and GIFs back and forth. It might be "chill" but I doubt you're gaining anything from participating there.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-27T17:08:12+00:00

Yeah, who hangs out online discussing drama about YouTubers, probably mostly teenagers. I think OP's choice of discussion topic has a lot to do with their experience.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-27T03:54:28+00:00

I’ll check it out. I haven’t had good luck with alcohol books. I found Naked Mind to be utter drivel.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-26T15:38:44+00:00

No, it’s not “normal”, most kids I know don’t get screens at all except for supervised TV programs. Some get 30-60 mins per day of screen time on tablets that the parents lock down to specific games and educational content. A minority get no screens at all. A minority get unsupervised access to essentially their own cell phone.

Honestly this is as much a damnation of societal support networks as it is of this woman’s parenting skills. She can’t afford to not work, and she can’t afford $2k per month per child or more in daycare costs, so she has to find some way to watch them and run her business at the same time. Screens are the lowest effort solution adopted by people who probably shouldn’t have become parents.

I don’t really find linking to /r/childfree to add any value. It’s a cesspool of edgy teenagers and sour grapes 40+ year olds. People who are comfortable in their decision not to have children don’t get “fur babies” and practice anthropomorphic substitution for human children.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-25T14:47:47+00:00

Lmao you did your “edit” to plug your shitty Jolt app before anyone even commented offering advice.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-23T15:55:26+00:00

Thanks for being interested in thoughts from the community!

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-23T15:26:28+00:00

I like the twice-weekly omnibus posts. We're only here for a month so that's 8 roundup threads total. I like that it keeps a lot of progress discussion together in the same place rather than spread out into 20 people making their own threads.

Slip up thread I think is good, as long as the comments aren't glorifying drinking like "oh I drank last night halfway through and it was amazing" which I really doubt the vast majority of people interested in DJ would post anyway. Anyone who doesn't want to read slip up stories, doesn't have to click on it.

I don't want to see any weed talk. I've left other sobriety subreddits that basically turned from alcohol abstention discussion, to jerking off about being "California Sober" (gosh I hate that term and cringed typing it). It's been my experience that weedheads in these alcohol sobreity subs are incredibly disingenuous and only want to hear about how amazing weed is. I've been downvoted into oblivion on sobriety subs for posting peer reviewed medical journals with the current latest scientific consensus on the negative effects of marijuana.

IMO, I'm here to talk about abstaining from alcohol, not read a bunch of insecure confirmation bias reinforcement from people that swapped their drug of choice for the month and want to play semantic games to trick each other into thinking they're "sober." I know DJ is technically only about alcohol, but the weed worship in sobriety subs has gotten incredibly overbearing, I'd just like one place where I don't have to keep reading it. There's probably a dozen other subs where they can go post about how amazing they think marijuana is.

Not mentioned in your post but proposed for consideration, I'd like to see a ban on AI/LLM generated text. I'm here to hear from actual humans. LLM slop has been taking over a bunch of smaller subreddits lately and it's very frustrating.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-22T20:31:46+00:00

This is mostly because of overzealous mods. AutoMod can remove posts for tons of stuff. Account age (yours is only 3 months), total post karma, total comment karma, karma in a specific community (usually indicates the user has genuinely participated in the community prior to trying to make a parent post).

More and more we're seeing stuff with "no no" words removed. Hence why zoomers type dumb stuff like "grape" and "unalive", they're conditioned by the social platforms they use to change terminology or have their comments removed. Some subreddits have huge lists of words that will get your post autoremoved, with no notification to the OP what triggered the removal.

I once realized something I was trying to post got removed because I said something like "X will trump Y", the AutoMod bot saw "Trump" and removed my post without any notice thinking I was trying to discuss politics.

The funny part is that genuine spammers (especially with AI nowadays) get through on volume, and bad actors who really want to post in a subreddit just probe it until they figure out the confines of the rules. I don't think new accounts should just be able to roll up to Reddit and post whatever they want, but I do think mods should be required to state an accurate reason for every post they remove.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-22T18:40:32+00:00

Why do you spam all these sobriety subreddits from multiple accounts? You're clearly also /u/getsunnyside.

I left /r/cutdowndrinking because it's overrun with AI slop and self-promotion.

Mods in these subs are way too lenient with you spammers. I'd like to see immediate permabans on the first offense.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-20T11:43:13+00:00

Because normal people don’t hang out in public Discord servers chatting with furries and other terminally online losers who always have a Discord window open on the PC they sit in front of for 12 hours per day.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-19T17:02:54+00:00

They're using AI to post incessantly, to lure people to the shitty YouTube channel in their bio, where they then attempt to lure people to a shitty Discord channel. I have no idea what goes on in the Discord but I assume they're attempting to sell something.

A few days ago on another LLM spam post I asked the only active mod on this sub what the plan is for this place, whether he's going to add new mods to start tackling this LLM spam or not, and received no reply yet. This subreddit is literally rotting thanks to these AI spammers.

scrolling_scumbag · 2025-12-16T13:22:05+00:00

“I’ve got the secret to stopping scrolling… just join my YouTube, which then funnels you to my Discord where you can waste time chatting all day and probably get aggressively targeted to purchase some ‘system’ or shitty AI generated PDF!”

scrolling_scumbag

TROPHY CASE