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.
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.