Remember to occasionally search for “site:reddit.com [your username]”.
I’m unfamiliar with Reddit because I haven’t had an account, but can people delete their account on Reddit, and does that automatically delete all their stuff too?
No, you have to individually overwrite all your comments and then delete them to actually make them disappear. Even after all that workl some people have reported their comments returning.
Just checked my account and despite overwriting all my comments before deleting them…yeah, they’re all back now.
and this is why when I delete my comments on lemmy I edit them.
Lemmy deletes the posts if a user is banned from their own instance or you delete the account.
that’s cool. Reddit used to too.
I’m not expecting lemmy to be a dick about it, but call it insurance.
When Reddit’s API debacle happened lots of people moved away. Some deleted their comments, some edited them with a message in protest. But sadly the consequences is that a lot of history and useful information got lost in the process.
I don’t know how I feel about this. I understand why it’s done and even why it needs to be done, but it still makes me sad considering the amount of times where Reddit saved me from massive headaches with IT stuff and so on…
Reddit undeleted a lot of the content removed during the API debacle. This comment must have been after that because you can see the latest comment is post API changes.
That’s why I didn’t close my account and still do a new turn of mass edits every 2-3 months. I have nothing deleted, just constantly overwritten. I get regularly banned from some subreddits after each wave, probably because some comments may trigger some sort of spam detection and edits alert the mods then.
reddit can detect if you did massedit as suspicious activity, a normal person cant change multiple comments at once, but with a script they will see it as botting.
The sad part of it is that they (reddit) can still access that deleleted information and sell it for AI training. Even as a “power” user you can use websites that “undelete” that content. The only ones truly affected by this are people randomly browsing reddit.
I mean it does reduce the value of the content that users created on reddit if a ton of random comments were deleted in protest. Every time you hit a thread like the OOP it reduces reddit 's value to the individual, and in aggregate it reduces reddits value
Did you actually read my comment? That’s an issue casual users have. If you want to see deleted comments, there’s a way to do that.
The only thing that actually hurts reddit is if people stop using it an generating new content.
As someone who deleted their posts… yes. The goal was to make Reddit worse, by removing my contributions to it because they forgot where their value came from.
My content had some small value to them. They didn’t deserve it.
I hear these justifications a lot, but the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.
The value of the archival data that can be affected by deleting or editing is almost entirely only user-accessed value. Reddit isn’t harmed at all from the edits. It primarily needs active regular users to improve its stock value. Alternatively, it can sell archival data for AI training.
Editing old comments removes neither value source from Reddit. You moved away from it so deprived it of both the material value of new comments and the statistical value of being an active user. Reddit also assuredly has saved data from before the API issue and can likely spot and clean the mass edits to sell the data from training purposes.
Conversely, the value to users and society is high. So many solutions to problems that are gone forever. The Internet is decaying already and it gets harder to find useful information, and those leaving decided to just burn down a library of Alexandria.
It’s their - and your - right, sure. They’re by definition done on comments the user owns. But this is just punching desperate Internet users in the face hoping it gives Reddit a bloody nose.
the highest value content, is mostly political anyways, its draws in more money for a platform, because users are addicted ragebait.
Would you sign up for a social media website if all the tech support posts looked like the above?
This. Good points above an all, but they missed this being the main point. imo
I wouldn’t sign up for a social media website if all the useful posts were from before June, 2023.
That’s why the people deleting their posts also stop posting
If that were true, then why did Reddit respond to the mass deletions (that’s what people did at first, not edits) by undeleting the comments?
those leaving decided to just burn down a library of Alexandria.
More like I had my book taken off the shelves because the librarians are dicks
Ah, where are those books now? Which shelves can I find them on?
I get the metaphorical point, but it’s a point without effect. “Removing with no possible present or future access” is the same as “burning” for society’s purposes.
where are those books now?
Lemmy
You’ve reposted all of your deleted Reddit comments to Lemmy?
Nope, all new comments. Better comments. If you miss the old ones, well sorry but it’s weird that you’re trying to claim ownership over my thoughts and self expression. I don’t owe you or the internet a damn thing.
I hope they delete all your stuff when your account gets banned because I’ve left at least three of those in my wake
I believe they are still there but hidden.
Quite possibily it depends on the type of ban you received (e.g. spam vs inflicting harm on xyz)
I know better than to threaten people online. It was all stupid political bullshit.
That’s not really what I meant.
What I was trying to say is no ban is equal. Reddit may very well have nuance to bans they can utilize that will prevent you from just participating in comments/upvotes to full on shadow-bans.
They don’t delete your content, they just redact your username and disassociate each individual comment from your larger profile so nobody could, for example, click on the deleted user who posted a comment in r/abc and see they also posted a particular comment in r/xyz.
The reason tools like Redact (many of them all use this same name lol) have taken off in popularity is because they delete, or redact the contents of your posts before you delete the account, thus making even that vestigial data worthless.
Its not guaranteed. They may keep a copy of the original post around.
In fact, anyone could
I’m fairly certain they do not
Cool they can have all my toxic hatred against Republicans for their AI to learn from
Yup, Reddit fucked us all after we gave them our knowledge for free.
Trick people into thinking they’re contributing to a commons, steal the contributions and run. Very understandable that many people decided to retaliate after the betrayal.
I really hope decentralized knowledge bases take off. Aggregating niche knowledge from experts and non-experts everywhere the internet touches is such a valuable proposition!I had like one useful comment posted to Reddit. I’ve left it up, and once every few months I get a comment being appreciative for the info.
Reddit gets the traffic because of Google indexing the original post of a user with the problem. People are going to visit it regardless of whether they’ll find the answer or not. In fact, if they don’t find it, they’re more likely to keep browsing posts in the hope of finding something.
Is this post better suited for c/mildlyinfuriating or c/fuckingawesome?
I know it’s great that Reddit is getting less useful but it’s still infuriating that I can’t find any help on very specific issues where the only answer was that one deleted comment/post.
Oh yeah, I sympathize with that problem. I have no sympathy for Reddit though. We all should have invested our time in something that had the users’ best interests in mind. Something like the fediverse.
Thanks for getting me to finally run one of these scripts to scramble and delete everything in my old account. Fuck every American corporation and their user experience.
They restored all my comments a few months later, so I’ve tried it again by editing all my comments to gibberish.
I keep checking mine, no reverse yet. Been a few months, 2 since my last purge
Exactly the tool I’ve used. I purged it about a year ago and randomly discovered that everything was restored about a month ago. I don’t know when it was restored, though.
They just added comment history hiding as well, so now you can’t even tell if some people are engaging in good faith anymore.
So I get banned for reporting trolls because it’s an “Abuse of the Report Button” AND they make it easier to Troll? Do they just want people not using the site?
@QueenHawlSera @nightlily pretty sure that you just have to consider reddit as having been very much broken for a number of years now.
They erroneously ban good users and encourage the trolls.
The only way the experience is bearable is just to block idiots yourself and not engage.I couldn’t even get them to respond to appeals, so I just deleted the fucking account
I was a paying user who accidentally used an alt account a day before a ban was up.
The ban was ridiculous and unjustified but I understand alt accounts are against the rules. My appeal was rejected.
It was stupid if me to pay in the first place. My profile was linked to my real identity as result.
Like I said, I never got a rejection, they just straight up did not answer my appeal.
@QueenHawlSera lol. they blocked my account for having been created to evade a previous ban. Which was odd. First account there.
Figured it was some automated bollocks they’d be able to check.
Appealed, they reinstated it. Then permabanned it later same day for same reason. Gave up.
you cant tell if people are botting/spamming
WTF? View removed comment?
It’s for alternate Reddit front-ends and rarely ever works.
This must be new.
Welcome to “soft delete”, where database entries are marked with a “deleted” flag instead of being actually deleted. Makes it trivial to restore things a user has “deleted”. Actually, even without soft deletes, modern databases maintain an audit trail which tracks all changes made anywhere, which also makes it easy to restore “deleted” items. And actually actually, databases are regularly backed up and when a user “deletes” their data the sites don’t go into the backups and delete the data there, so everything anyone posts is technically in existence forever (not really because because backups won’t last forever but they can last a very long time).
I’m sure that when reddit sells its data to companies to train their AI on, they’re selling backups from before users started mass-deleting their histories.
reddit is quickly making itself irrelevant.
who knew extreme censorship would be bad for the exchange of information??
censorship and being censured as well.
Don’t look at what’s been happening with the stock price.
I’m trying to get the image of spez wanking to that price graph out of my head.
This actually isn’t necessarily censorship. This is more likely users deleting their comments when moving away from Reddit to… Surprise! Lemmy.
Back during the big move people made a lot of scripts and apps to do that for them and my unpopular opinion is that its been not a good thing to do. Unless they archive their answers somewhere else it is lost knowledge. I know I am pretty alone with that view so please don’t start a discussion again, I won’t reply.
Yeah, I get so pissed when people nuke their comment history. Why do that when you don’t have too much of personal revealing information in that post or comment? Even one of the mods of AskHistorians expressed frustration of insightful posts and comments being deleted by OP. I did not even delete any of my posts before I deleted my Reddit account, because there are no revealing information, and I know some of my posts and comments will be helpful for others.
fuck that, the more people nuke their comments on reddit, the faster site becomes useless. The faster it become useless, the faster lemmy grows. So I say bombs away.
You may disagree with the net effect of the decision, but the decision is not hard to understand. The people that are doing it are placing a larger value on harming Reddit as a platform to hopefully force corrective change or encourage movement to competing platforms. You place a larger value on preserving knowledge.
You say you get pissed. My question is do you get pissed at the person who deleted it, or do you get pissed at Reddit for alienating it’s own users to the point of deleting their own comments?
I have just read other people’s comments as to why Redditors delete their comments. But even before the enshitiffication, I and others find it frustrating when comments are deleted.
I do too. But I blame Reddit for that, not the users.
And why do a lot of leave reddit and join lemmy? For me I got tired of getting banned and having my comments deleted all the time aka censorship. I’ve nuked my comment history out of spite at least five times after bans.
I wish we were at the point where its applicable to every support question. fuck reddit. the company. not the knowledge base provided by its users.
lol, yeah. Ain’t it funny?
good, but it’s not enough
Don’t forget the random comments in other languages because people are not aware of reddit’s shitty auto-translate feature when you come from a google search.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
What a spezhole
Well said, I fully support it. Let’s hope at least this place doesn’t turn into 1984 like others.
Thanks, SPEZ!
Fuck that pedophile wannabe.
Don’t forget racist, too!
Try AI tbh. It’s saved me from tons of forum posts in pursuit of specialized technical knowledge, where I’d often be lucky to get a response at all.
You have downvotes because lemmy hates LLMs so much. It doesn’t reflect reality or the general population. I’m not even critical of the hate, its the communities consensus.
Purity test not found. It’s a tool, it is useful to me and saves me time and trouble.
Are LLMs good or just everything else is so enshitified that they look good in comparison?
