I’d been on Reddit for 13 years and finally managed to detox by doing two things only.

• Uninstalling the app from my phone (along with LinkedIn, which I have to use, but despise). Since the browser experience is terrible, that was half the problem.
• Strategically muting subreddits that annoyed me.

Wall of text about why (but I’ll use paragraphs):

In recent years, I started noticing that everything discussion-oriented was either a Dunning-Kruger driven echo chamber or a total circlejerk for the default progressive opinion on that subject. And, anything content-oriented was reposts.

Quick caveat: I’m not saying that every progressive position is bad, only that I enjoy forming my own positions without getting yelled at. Also, I don’t know OP’s sub and I’m sure it was well-moderated. I’d imagine quitting as a mod would be emotionally harder.

Anyway, for a few weeks, whenever some low-info/naive/didactic opinion or recycled content popped up, I muted that sub.

The last to go was my professional sub, since I’m in a small field. But once I realized all I’d done there in 13 years was help people starting out, but never once received help myself (since there are virtually no posters with experience), I was good to go. I can mentor elsewhere and probably help way more.

Once I muted stuff, I had a few content subs left like r/urbanhell or r/catio, or other fun stuff I want to keep. But my feed is suddenly super quiet, so I just open it once a week, like a magazine.

It’s not quite quitting, but that’s for when Huffman (or whoever replaces him) realizes that to move the revenue needle, they need to block adblockers like YouTube, or go fucking nuts with sponsored posts, or sell personal data, or build their own LLM on everyone’s posts, or whatever they’re gonna do.

And it probably won’t be Huffman anyway, since he just dumped half a million shares at $50+ and can therefore buy an island, so he is absolutely out of there 😂

Meanwhile, if I’m Reddit’s Unix admin or whatever and have waited for years to vest my equity, I can’t even sell for another 5.5 months. It ain’t gonna be $50+ then. Brutal.

And that’s how it goes. Never again. I don’t miss it, since sending Lemmy memes to my Signal chats replaces most of the hijinks and sex/the outdoors replaces the dopamine.

Dude! Bro! Son!

So for you, you’re objectively not smart enough to have the debate with. You’re all set, you don’t need to do anything 👍

Ok ok, I’ll give you what you seem to need. Let’s step back a moment and recall the context of this thread: Apple’s being shady as hell about complying with the DMA and everyone’s piling on. I’ve noted that Apple is pretty greedy, but probably not as objectively evil as some other big tech companies, so this is a circlejerk. But, it’s verboten to say that Apple’s not terrible. I’ve also said that at least they innovate, but that’s also verboten. You can’t say Apple innovates. So, that’s why we’re here.

Now, going from memory, I’ve listed some Apple products that I think were innovative for their time. You’ve made a few counterpoints. Btw, it did take some time for that reply. I hope you weren’t… researching? If not, congratulations: you’re fellow GenX and either you have an eidetic memory or you work in UI/UX. Either way, you did teach me a couple of things, so thanks for that.

Let’s go point by point:

• MS stole from Xerox and Apple did too, but Apple was sued - You didn’t mention that Xerox lost the case, since you can’t patent the concept of a UI. Also, Apple released their first Mac more than a year before Microsoft released Windows 1.0, which by all measure was utterly atrocious and looked slapped together. Are you sure Microsoft didn’t borrow from Apple instead of Xerox? You’re leaving out all the context here and I don’t come away thinking the early Macs were not innovative.
• Apple stole from LG when they noticed Google was building a mobile OS - You didn’t mention that although LG sued Apple, Apple then produced design docs that proved they’d been working on that years earlier… and LG lost the case. I’m not even going to bother linking to Wikipedia. I didn’t remember the Prada, though. You omitted things here too, so I’m not feeling like the iPhone wasn’t innovative. It was the first commercially viable smartphone. You make a good point that Apple and Google were in an arms race on smartphones, though I’m not sure if you knew you were making that point. Of course, Google being Google, they bought the solution, still got beaten to the market, and then Android absolutely sucked ass for years anyway. Not to mention, early Android was basically iOS with a Google search box and moar telemetry.
• 192 kbps existed and so do hardware DACs - I didn’t know what DACs were, so thanks for that. But, I wonder if anyone could hear the difference on the headphones of the time? I also hadn’t heard of the Cowon and don’t know anyone who had one. I wonder if they sold… eleven units? Maybe you meant Creative Zen? Creative sold a ton of MP3 players and I had a few, but the iPod was much better. This is a straw man argument anyway, though. You’re saying that since one random MP3 player that nobody bought had a better DAC, and also that 192 kbps exists (this is literally just offered randomly), the iPod was not innovative. I’m not sure it’s working out for you.

As for this:

The real issue for you isn’t your “done seeking out a non-group think argument”, the reality is you are desperately looking for a group-think group that only sees Apple as some all mighty and infallible company that can do no wrong and none can do better than them. I wish you the best of luck finding such a group, but as you’ve noticed, it won’t be here.

That sounds great. If I were 20, I’d be very intimidated and I’d feel cast out. I’d be sad. But actually, that’s … another straw man argument! Love those. I’m “desperately” looking for a group that thinks Apple is all-mighty, I won’t find it here, good luck with that, etc. Well yes, but actually no. Congrats on proving that a thing I never said is unavailable to me 😂

That took 20 minutes and I could have done literally anything else with that time. I should bill you.

Oh, man. I’m definitely not going to point by point. On a sub-argument that’s not even the topic of the thread? These are minutes in my life I don’t get back. But, seriously? My argument is invalid because I said Windows 95 instead of XP? And I must not have used any good MP3 players? By the way, they all sounded the same since they were playing 128 kbps MP3s… by the definition of how those work, they had to 😂

And just to consider this from another angle, if apple did get the goggles from hololens, where did Microsoft get their UI from in the 80s? How about Android?

Wow, I am so, so done seeking out a non-groupthink argument in this format ever. On any site. The memes are still better than Reddit though!

Please do continue to spew ad-hominem copypasta from every Apple hate thread in the history of Reddit like you’re a first-gen LLM trained on r/foss posts. “All of that existed way before Apple” … please feel free to refute each product I listed as being innovative or new by showing where it previously existed. I’d love to understand how some form of the iPhone was around way before Apple, or the iPad – please go for it.

As for the statement that OSX is based on BSD, wow! Such an important distinction when BSD is a descendant of UNIX… this is a nice little straw man thing, please go look up what a straw man argument is.

On Jobs getting banned from demos, that’s actually hilarious. But please do list any products I named that Apple objectively stole. I’m sure you have all the info there.

Just super fun times, I always hoped that Lemmy would have a higher level of discussion than Reddit. But how can it, when it’s the same people and they’re even more self-important? :D

Yes, Xerox PARC existed, and was totally non-commercial / didn’t offer any product. Saying the iPod was the same thing as all those crappy MP3 players we all lugged around in the aughts is objectively LOL. The rest of your comment is pretty much ad-hominem and editorial – and of course, you don’t refute the rest of my points because you can’t.

Bottom line, discussions like this on Lemmy are no different than Reddit ever was. They’re circlejerks. I figured I’d drop in this one time to note that, but ultimately it’s pretty boring.

Oh, man! Quite a bit of traffic on my original comment. I won’t spend time engaging on these since they’re pile-ons, but this is objectively trivial to refute.

“They’ve almost never done anything new”? Seriously? How about the user interface when everyone was using DOS? Or the Mac Plus/SE/any of half a dozen other macs in the 80s and early 90s that redefined what a computer could act like and look like? When every other PC was a beige box with identical specs?

Maybe the iPod, which redefined that category and made every other MP3 player obsolete overnight? The iPhone, perhaps? This was the absolute gimme, like I can’t imagine how you made that comment with the iPhone hanging around. What were phones before the iPhone? Blackberries and flip phones. Yeah, it couldn’t copy/paste for two years, but Steve wanted it released, lol.

The iPad would be another. There were smart watches before Apple’s, sort of, but they were pretty crappy and didn’t do the same stuff.

While we’re at it, find me some PC laptops that ever debuted with the stuff Apple put in theirs. High-res screens? Touch ID? Face ID? Even OSX, which is old as hell, is built on UNIX and rock-stable – and was definitely innovative when it first came out, as were some of its predecessors. When OSX came out, your alternative was Windows 95.

Then there are the airpods, I don’t think there were any wireless bluetooth earbuds before those, although I might be wrong. And finally, despite it being way too expensive and five generations away from being useful, the ski goggles. Before you say there’s other VR goggles, recall that only Apple is doing that as AR computing instead of dumb fucking avatars in virtual conference rooms that probably run telemetry on how big your living room is and sell it.

By all means, say Apple is greedy as hell, but don’t make stuff up.

That’s fair. It is whataboutism (is that one word or 7?) And, I’m pissed off not only that Apple is messing with basic DMA compliance, but that they literally forked all their software rather than do this in the US.

At the same time, I hate Apple the least of big tech, since they actually do give a crap about building good products and have done quite a bit of that. One can make the argument that zero other big tech companies do.

Should we expect more of all of them? I’m not gonna die on that hill! It is way, way too late to stop this corporatocracy, but one can hope.

This is a Reddit-style circle jerk. A LOT of people like Apple, because even though they’re almost as remorseless as Amazon or Microsoft or Google when it comes to maximizing profits, they build good products, create new product categories, and they’ve been doing both of those things for 40 years.

Is this a sleazy thing to do? Yup. Is it as sleazy as Meta intentionally allowing its algorithm to push softcore kiddie porn to teen Instagram users? Nope. Not even in the same ballpark.