Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
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I didn’t decide to break up with reddit. I was happy with reddit. Reddit dumped me.
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Because Reddit is still a recent ex
I do have to admit I felt a little bad when Digg started sending “We miss you” emails, but I held my ground.
This makes me sad. Information is being erased that will keep people who could’ve been helped by it from ever finding it.
The people who it will hurt the most have nothing to do with Reddit.
Sad, yes. And I’m willing to admit that it would hurt the people who have nothing to do with Reddit.
But if it keeps those people away from Reddit, see Reddit as not the place to find information, see Reddit as a place that was, full of [deleted] comments, see Reddit as an awful dumpster fire, it is worth it.
It’s too easy to see Reddit as the Library of Alexandria, but it isn’t. It was a place where people willingly shared information to other people, sure, but it now isn’t, and it’s more important for people to be made aware of that: It is no longer a place for sharing information.
EDIT: Typos and shit.
I know it sounds like a shitty thing to do but the point is to hurt these people who are looking for help, who will then look for and hopefully contribute to a community elsewhere, which will harm Reddit in the long run. it sucks for people looking for help in the meantime
Yeah, would be nice to have a script that went through old comments and just addended them to say " edit - July 2023: please don’t respond to this, I won’t see it, I’ve moved on to Lemmy. Come [ join me] (Lemmy hyperlink)!
Yeah that’s why I’ve decided to leave my account on there. I’m sure some of my posts may be helpful.
I originally left some posts I thought may be useful but I deleted them now. We need to bite the bullet and build that knowledge up again here. If we leave the content behind, people will keep going to reddit as their first stop and keep asking questions there + feeding the ads instead of coming here.
Yea, I’m leaving my account active but just not posting with it anymore. I only use reddit on my desktop now to view the few subreddits that have not moved to a new site/forum yet.
There’s too much useful information on reddit going away. I understand the sentiment and the act of protest, but it’s still painful to the common man.
Yep. This is the reason I left all my posts and comments up on Reddit. I can get over the fact Reddit is making money off what I posted if I am helping people in the future.
Of the two evils, one being allowing a shitty company profiting off of your work, and the other depriving people of easy answers - The latter is the lesser of the two.
Chat GPT can give you most answers, otherwise make a new thread.
Completely agree, it’s like when Youtube removed dislikes, it’s not helping people, it just makes things more complicated.
There’s one important distinction to be made here:
- Youtube, the company, removed dislikes.
- Reddit users, individually, out of their own volition, removed their comments.
You’re free to leave your own comments over there, no one’s forcing you to delete them. Youtube, on the other hand, forced their decision on others, regardless of whether they wanted it or not.
There aren’t enough people doing this for it to have an effect. You guys don’t seem to see the broader picture. This is nothing.
By that logic, there is no point in voting.
Time to start building all that library of knowledge on the fediverse
That’s why I saved a backup of my comments before I edited/wiped them all on Reddit.
When I get time I’ll go through all 10 years worth of the backup to find information I can share again here.
Exactly. Waiting for some communities to get formed (I don’t want to run them or be a moderator). Some have started but low activity, especially in the health genre.
I’m really excited for the fediverse. I also knew that patience would prevail on lemmy world as they deal with growth. Today has been amazing to see all the updates they did to improve performance.
Finding all sorts of cool stuff on many instances to subscribe to. I’m actually starting to like this more than Reddit w/Apollo which is crazy to even say.
I find it problematic that Reddit thinks it can just sell all the content it’s users created. I like that people are deleting everything, making the site less useful, but it is sad losing all of that knowledge. I hope it reappears in the fediverse.
Imagine if Wikipedia changed its financial model. That would be a major, major problem.
I stripped years of posts off of r/vans when I realized my submissions were almost always the top results on Google images when searching basic keywords (not gaming the search). I’ve built [email protected] here and I’ve been posting my content from reddit here.
The thought of leaving my content on reddit and driving further traffic to that site just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Imagine my surprise hoping to see some sweet converted rides and got sneaks, lol.
I should buy a pair though.
Haha that would occasionally happen on r/vans. Was always great when someone posted an actual van without checking the sub out first.
I was pleasantly surprised to see sneakers instead of vans like the car. I subbed thanks to you. Thank you!
It’s crazy how some of the communications from their CEO has been.
He clearly thinks he owns all the content on the platform and even called the third party app users ‘freeloaders’ when a ton of them were top contributors to the platform.
He also said the mods - the ones who provide all the unpaid labor to moderate everything posted by unpaid content contributors - act like “landed gentry”. It’s almost like he’s trying to piss everyone off.
In a lot of subs it was like that though, to be fair.
Some mods go around collecting subs like cards. I’ve seen certain subs where the mods didn’t really bother protesting, or even did protests that actually drove traffic and platform engagement (r/awww and r/videos) because the thought of being removed from their positions of power was too much to handle.
These kind of mods felt like they ‘owned’ the subreddit in the same way spez thought he ‘owned’ everything. It was not free labour for them, they loved doing it and controlling content streams. If they were asked to pay money to stay as mod, they probably would.
Sorry if this post offends any of the good mods. If you are more likely to say ‘the sub I moderate’ over ‘my sub’ then you are probably one of the good ones, my statements don’t apply, and the whole ‘landed gentry’ thing is incredibly offensive.
Stupid me thinking that buying awards for excellent content was the only compensation Reddit needed (along with memberships).
Boy was I wrong. I’m hoping Lemmy World will get awards that we can award others to help offset server costs.
I think the current method is better. You can subscribe / donate to main developers working on Lemmy and assist with their server costs. Donation links are accessible on Lemmy’s github page.
Right? Completely disregarding the fact that all content is user generated and moderated by volunteers. I raged when I saw that statement.
This is what stopped me from doing it. I always feel like if I’ve helped make one person’s day a little bit better, then I’ve done my bit as a human.
I know how good it is when you have a really complex, niche, problem and someone gives the answer you exactly needed, and I don’t want to take that away from the public, even though a company I don’t support is profiting off my comments and submissions.
Yeah I feel the same as a big preservationist. I feel that I got value from Reddit before, now I don’t anymore but that doesn’t take away what I benefitted from previously.
So instead I edited my top 30 comments and added something to the effect of “As of Jul 2023 I’m on lemmy kthxbye”.
This is a better solution in my view 👍
When you can’t trust the company not to paywall your contribution or hold it hostage, it’s time to sever ties and do what you can to kill the platform. Every new contribution to Reddit is a further waste of our collective efforts. The sooner the platform dies the sooner contributors move somewhere else where their posts will be in safer hands.
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I can’t imagine reading through a full TOS. I know I should be, but damn, I wouldn’t have much time for anything else in life if I read all these ridiculously long TOS that companies put out.
Wikipedia entre database is open for download. It’s under a license which means that anyone may host another Wikipedia clone at any time.
Don’t worry about data from Wikipedia - it should be safe. Totally different beast than Reddit.
Yup, I usually download a snapshot every year or so. It’s more because I feel ways about digital archival, but it’s super convenient to be able to access that information offline as well.
damn isnt your hard drive full by now? Only downloading the text content or also all the other media like images/video/sound files?
I assume there’s at least someone out there who has a full download of Wikipedia on their computer, ready to go up as soon as the website decides it wants to go to shit.
I think the mentality at reddit leadership has changed just about 180° since it started. It’s not just Steve Huffman, although he is leading it.
Originally they were part of building a community, and users were part of that community.
Now they have become an ordinary business, who believe they are providing a service that should not just be sustainable but monetized as much as possible, and users are no longer a real community, but merely users of a service for profit. No different from Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.
But it’s a simple service, not more than a fancy forum, where users provide the content. It’s doubtful the service is valuable enough, to allow drawing out much money on advertising before users go elsewhere. And when the users go, so does the content, which can easily turn into a death spiral.
I have noticed more and more [deleted] messages in older threads lately. I was trying to do some Rimworld modding, and the threads relevant to my questions were 1-5 years old, ~20 upvotes, and 2-3 positively voted top level comments. Almost all of them had a [deleted] comment.
10 years of angularjs, angulat, react, and c# answers to problems just disapeared from reddit last week as i wiped all my accounts
As a developer, this hits deep. RIP quality answers & search results for c# (in my case) related quedtions
Hopefully Lemmy starts to fill that hole in as more people join and more questions asked then answered.
The thing is - when I gave good answers, I mostly wrote them in Obsidian - so that I have Marktext files with my most interesting answers anyway.
So they haven’t gone, they just don’t exist inside Reddit any more. Anyone with the same questions could still get them - if there were an equivalent alternative to whatever subreddit exists.
In the case of Linux answers, however, I don’t give a toss - because one of the worst things about Reddit is that the best repository of information for any distribution should be the official forum for that distribution… and interestingly, I suffered zero pain using my official forum, whilst Reddit mods seem to enjoy kicking you out for a day or three for telling someone to format queries in a useful way.
Yeah, mine was more related to Shopify, eCommerce and health matters. Your stuff was highly technical and took time to share. I still say bravo.
Congrats on becoming the dead mediafire link that fixed the next 5 replies.
I get it. But I also hate how useless the internet has now become for me. Kept trying to do research on a topic the other day and kept ending up at private subreddits or reddit comments with nothing but deleted comments. It will take years (if ever) for that kind of knowledge to grow again. I’m just completely at the mercy of random SEO crap reviews or gut instinct now when I need to research stuff to buy.
Who were you denvercoder9? What did you see?!
I do understand. The problem is, I’m hearing that Reddit is testing the idea of forcing people to log in. At that point, SEO becomes worthless as the spiders can’t crawl the data to even suggest it to you in the first place.
The fact of the matter is, Reddit is bloated in staff and expenses. They are already monetizing everyone’s content with awards and ads from users using their site and app. Now they are double-dipping with the API used by many to submit content.
They chose to bite the hands that feed them so many of us decided to stop serving them food, including the leftovers.
Hopefully Elon’s little tantrum over the weekend has scared them enough not to do it. But I doubt it has
The reality is that as long as we’re making centralized platforms driven purely by profit the center of knowledge we’re going to keep burning the Library Of Alexandria.
Even if everyone wasn’t removing their comments and making subs private, that content only continues to exist online for as long as it provides reddit some form of value. The value it provides you and others is only significant in so far as it serves reddits immediate profit motives. The moment they determine they can’t meet their revenue goals they will shut it all down.
The only solution if we want to stop repeating this cycle is to go back to more sustainable models of distributed content, rather than the VC backed blitzscaling and hyper centralization that we know as social media today.
Lemmy (hopefully) fits the bill for this type of solution. Though it still sucks that we have to burn Alexandria again to depart in that direction
I guess my question is how does Lemmy solve this problem in particular? Maybe I don’t understand it fully, but is there anything stopping an instance from shutting down and losing all the content associated with that instance? Users still have the ability to delete their posts and comments, don’t they? I do think there are many benefits to the decentralized system, but in these specific ways I’m not seeing a tangible benefit.
Have you tried excluding reddit from your search results? Don’t forget reddit is nothing but a regurgitation of the internet. The info you want is still out there.
Reddit is a collection of people’s thoughts and opinions. So no, I’m not sure that information is elsewhere. Where for example can I find a community like buy it for life? Or the home automation community? What Google served to me instead were corporate ads, not real user experience and opinions on products
Yup. They refused to pay me for my comments and posts so I overwrote and deleted them all before deleting my account.
I deleted all comments from my 2 latest Reddit accounts, 5 digits karma. If I ever revisit Reddit it’s though as blocked browser without an account.
I just did the same thing. I deleted all my posts and comments on my 14k karma account. I’ll be keeping the account though, just for the memories.
Just overwrote everything in the old account; will set the system to delete everything tonight and then a 10-year-old account is done. I will keep the account for a while longer, should they decide to restore anything I’ve deleted.
Deleted my 13 years of comments and posts recently. Just gonna leave this here for folks… https://www.playerup.com/accounts/redditaccount/
Edit:
In case anyone mistakes that link for how I deleted my comments: I used power delete suite.
Wow! Wow… Oh, I could get enough for a new game.
I didn’t know you could sell your Reddit account. I deleted posts and comments on my 4 year old account with over 14k karma.
is it possible to locally backup all my comments and posts? I just want to save some important stuff throughout the years before overwriting all of it.
Power Delete Suite has an option to save all content it deletes in a CSV before it does any deletions.
If you GDPR request your data from Reddit you can use the following tool to access your user profile
I’ve seen a couple people complain that reddit is ignoring it, and even restoring their deleted posts.
Gotta keep up appearances so people cant see the steaming pile of shit is rotting away, i guess.
I deleted my reddit account yesterday. I figured what’s a better way to celebrate Independence Day by deleting my reddit account while watching fireworks and drinking a beer.
Of course, I used power delete to remove my comments before deleting my account.
I would recommend still sending a GDPR delete request if you are in EU just to be sure, since there may be stuff left behind in private communities, backups etc. It also forces reddit and their partners to delete data they use for advertising.
Little bonus, it is annoying for reddit to process GDPR requests.
I sent a GDPS request for my information in order to have an archive of my posts to look through and enjoy, perhaps remix and repost on here if possible. Apparently I submitted it while people were attempting to overwhelm reddit by mass requesting them, so idk if it will be approved
There’s no will in there. They must give you your data or else. The only thing they can do is to notify you of a required extension because they are overwhelmed. Sans that, they are obliged by law to give you what’s yours.
In the UK, requests can sometimes be denied
Something something actions and consequences.
When did you submit your request? I sent mine on the 22nd and they still haven’t replied. I’m thinking of reporting them to my country’s privacy authority if they don’t comply before 22/07.
Another hero is among us!
Many are waiting for their data takeout requests to complete before doing the same. And to follow up with GDPR requests/GDPR deletion requests.
All to improve their quarter numbers pre-IPO.
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If you don’t trust the reddit admins, why do you think that they wouldn’t keep a history of your comments, and just revert the gibberishification?
Nothing insane, but I had a 8 year account with 150k karma that I earned through informative posts, endearing pictures of my pug, and a few shitposts here and there. Banned for zero reason (yes i know, but seriously) by a mod that had an “in” with a Reddit admin, i’m sure of it.
Anyways, just went and deleted it, after it being a very, very constant in my life. Its been quite the cathartic experience, and somewhat freeing even. Mobile and reddit are a dangerous combination for the thinkers out there.
150k karma that I earned
Actually, this is one of the biggest issues with Reddit - assuming Karma has value and getting narcissistic feedback.
I got more than that replying to DadJokes with a quickly googled PUN once per day.
Yeah, Reddit loves upvoting their Puns. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get an inflated sense of self from the karma, but it was important to me as someone who mostly posted content and not comments.
Enjoying lemmy a lot right now though, including the new client I found for mobile.
Yep! Sync and (for the first few years) BaconReader brought me to Reddit. Not Reddit. I have several high karma accounts that are a decade plus. Nuked all of my comments and posts today, and now they’re up for sale!
