Reddit tried an experiment. And I'm shutting down a lot of notifications on my phone

I don't remember now exactly when it was, but within a few months of this post in August 2026, Reddit was testing a “for you” style feed in their app and on the website. It appears to have gone away, at least for me, again, within a month of this post. So the entire experiment maybe lasted a few weeks. But it was a painful few weeks.

I get it with something like TikTok. Perhaps the only real one that has made this work. I don't go on YouTube or Instagram to watch these short videos in my for you feed. I subscribe to things I'm interested in on YouTube, and on Instagram I just spend almost no time there, regardless of if they offered something like that or not.

I find that Facebook and Instagram are awful at suggesting me things. Facebook being just dogsh%t. I remember one week, in order to kind of make Facebook useful for me, I went in and blocked all of these “groups” that they thought I would like, and would keep shoving down my throat. I just don't go on there much anymore. Instagram does actually show me photos of people I'm friends with, so that's a little better, but again, I spend no time there.

Reddit decided to do an experiment which would do a “for you” style feed, of articles and user posts that it thinks I may be interested in. The problem is that I use reddit like I use YouTube. I don't go on there to watch (in the case of YouTube) or read (in the case of Reddit) anything. I have very specific things that I want to see. This was immediately a hell no from me. They offered a tabbed experience, with the default tab being “For You”. I would open it up and immediately switch it to my subscribed feed. I'm specifically going on Reddit to see what's new in the fields I'm interested in, and then I have one or two other subreddits that I don't subscribe to but that I do occasionally jump into. This is non-negotiable. Like any experiment, they would have to had measure results, and I would think a metric like “how long do they stay on the ‘for you’ tab” is one of those, and I was hoping my “0 seconds” metric showed up for almost everyone that cares about this.

In other news, my phone notifications have really been impossible to keep up with. I'd close my phone for like 2 hours and open it to 30-40 notifications. Everything lately has been wanting to tell me “there's a new video” or “here's an offer for something you don't need” etc. I uninstalled some apps and basically disallowed notifications on anything where notifications are not how I primarily interact with that app. Like a food app, after I order I want to know if it has arrived. Or my text messaging or email apps are still ok. YouTube notifications, no. Netflix, no. Etc. Turn it all off. I will see what's new when I go in, I don't need to be notified of everything!! This has helped a lot with just generally being angry at always getting notifications.

Here's a list of apps that I've turned off completely because they just kept adding to the problem (or preemptively :)):

YouTube, YouTube Music, Google, Bank app, a few trading apps, Discord, Food apps where I don't get delivery (don't care), Reddit, Netflix, Prime Video, Weather, cash apps like Venmo etc, Amazon.

Things that are still allowed to notify for now include:

mail, messages, slack, threads social (another meta app but not bad with notifications), news apps (athletic, atlantic, nyt), fantasy football apps but that FantasyPros is pushing my button a little, food apps that I use for delivery, work authentication apps like Okta, ESPN but also is in a probationary phase :D, and the calendar app.

The ESPN notifications may stay because that's how I learned immediately that the Sixers signed LeBron James and I just can't see myself thinking that it's better to not know stuff like that immediately! Haha.

I leave for the shore this weekend, hope to catch some waves all week!