Do the advantages of deleting one’s entire Reddit history outweigh the disadvantages?

I have previously nuked my first Reddit account because it felt satisfactory to be completely detached from a platform one considers unethical/bad. Though, I have garnered quite some history on a second account—because Duty Calls*, of course—and I’m considering doing the same.

However, I don’t want to do it impulsively. I think I might be blind to some disadvantages. What do you think?

*

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
    0·
    4 months ago

    I think it’s generally pointless, spiteful, and only harms ordinary users who might someday have found value in coming across your old posts on Reddit from a search. It doesn’t harm Reddit itself, the “value” of your individual account is very small compared to their vast archive. And they still have it, deletion just removes it from the public-facing front end. If the reason you’re deleting it is because you don’t want AI to be trained on it, that ship has long ago sailed. There are downloadable archives of Reddit floating around that it will never be deleted from.

    So I wouldn’t bother.

    • Tangentism@lemmy.ml
      0·
      4 months ago

      Reddit admins have already put things in place to counter editing or deleting comments.

      I deleted an account from 2011 yet when I searched on Google for “site:reddit.com account name”, it listed loads of posts with their previous content (I used the script that changed all the contents before deleting).

      All SM sites have been doing this for a while: they’ll shadow delete your account but will retain all the data.

      • pbjamm@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        And if they really want to they could restore the comments/posts with randomly generated user names.

  • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
    0·
    4 months ago

    Edit it instead of deleting it, but then i doubt it’s useful because they can revert everything. Before i moved i did a mass edit using plugin and even after a few days, some comment stay the same while others is successfully edited.

    There’s just no disadvantage of dumping your abusive SO though.

  • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    I contributed a lot of comments to the Godot community back when posts didn’t get much interaction, I wouldn’t want those gone. I still come across my own replies when looking up errors!

    • Cynicus Rex@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      4 months ago

      Fair enough. But a workaround that I have implemented before my previous “Reddit nuke” was saving all my most valuable answers and hosting them on my own website. What I would do now is just replacing all my comments with a link to my website: POSSE, Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Well, almost POSSE, because I’d be removing the actual content from Reddit.

  • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Thesis: Nuking your reddit account is good for your mental health

    Antithesis: If everyone nuked their reddit accounts, a lot of invaluable information (especially in niche communities) would be lost, and this would primarily hurt average people and not reddit as a corporation

    Synthesis: Nuking all reddit accounts is good for society’s health. Reddit is a trash website. In the short-term it will hurt, but long-term we are better off moving these communities to decentralized platforms. There are ways to archive the important information from reddit. Reddit thrives off the free contributions of countless users who are paid nothing, and reddit claims ownership and monetizes all content freely published to it. If you don’t like reddit, simply stop posting to it, no matter how juicy the bait

  • geekwithsoul@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    I had a Reddit account I opened in July 2009 that was fairly active and I deleted all my posts and comments when I left - mainly because I felt I couldn’t trust the company that ran it to be good stewards of the content and decided they weren’t entitled to it. All the stuff that’s happened in the last year has just reinforced that conclusion.

    Reddit makes money off the content everyone contributes (as well as the hard work of so many unpaid folks doing moderation) and that’s not a model I choose to support. Some of the conversations I was involved in had really help information on a number of topics, and while I’m sad that information isn’t still available to others, I think the overall good is better served by not supporting a site so at odds with my beliefs.

  • breadsmasher@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Deleting posts is basically pointless - reddit keeps everything you delete, it just is no longer shown to front end, regular users.

    If you are concerned of your posts and comments being used to feed openai, its way too late

    • Iceblade@lemmy.world
      0·
      4 months ago

      What’s better is to edit every comment and keep your acc active so they can’t roll it back.

      I asked through support whether they keep previous versions of edited comments and posts, which they claimed that they don’t.

      • Swordgeek@lemmy.ca
        0·
        4 months ago

        Absolutely true.

        I don’t believe for a second that Google and Reddit give a shit, though. Untilbwe see a company destroyed for violating the GDPR, they’ll just consider the risk of fines part of the cost of doing business.

      • alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        4 months ago

        Correct.

        But nobody is enforcing compliance.

        So they can just keep it on American servers and sell it to OpenAI or share it with the US government.

        Also, there are a lot of bots copying everything on reddit and other sites. Even if reddit would comply with GDPR, these bots cannot be traced and cannot be fined.

      • breadsmasher@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        Mostly - it gets messy with content being posted though. They absolutely should be deleting all personal information about you.

        I am however unsure how this applies to posts and comments which don’t contain personal information.

    • whoareu@lemmy.ca
      0·
      4 months ago

      You post on Lemmy aren’t safe from OpenAI either. They could just scrape entire Fediverse easily than Reddit.

    • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      It still helps damage reddit’s commercialisation of users because historic posts have gaps or disappear for new users. Editing posts and replacing with gobbledygook is probably more effective.

      Also, its not clear reddit is able to retain deleted posts. They have a vast live site to maintain - why would they ever have been focused on having an immutable back up of all deleted posts? They may have snapshots to restore after short term issues but it does not follow that they keep snapshots going back in time. Perhaps they do or perhaps like many companies they do the bare minimum in favour of keep costs down?

      I personally think its worth using sites that edit your posts and replace with garbage, as that is harder to separate out from true edits and helps pollute the data set for AI companies.

      • just another dev@lemmy.my-box.devEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        Also, its not clear reddit is able to retain deleted posts. They have a vast live site to maintain - why would they ever have been focused on having an immutable back up of all deleted posts?

        They do, though. Last year when there was a small exodus to Lemmy, lots of people deleted their history. Which reddit then recovered.

        The truth is, marking a comment or post as deleted, literally only takes one bit to store. deleted=1 or 0. However, if you go back and overwrite all your comments (not with an identical message, because that is easy to detect) - that would take more effort to recover.

        • MostlyBlindGamer@rblind.comEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          People deleted the content they had access to. As protesting subreddits went back to being public, the content they hadn’t been able to delete became visible again.

  • copygirl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    I did decide to delete all my comments and posts on Reddit. Sure, maybe I’ve posted some helpful comments, but why support Reddit with their continued existence? Remove content, and people might move to other sites to get their information.

    I also decided to keep my account. Turns out some content stayed around, because I could not see and therefore delete it in locked subreddits. So when they came back, the comments came back too, and I was able to delete them, still.

  • MaximilianKohler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    The ideal scenario would be to download your data, then upload it to your own static website before deleting it.

    Here’s an example of it: https://www.rareddit.com/

    But you’d need a static site generator built to do that, and I haven’t been able to get a response from the person who made that website. I’ve tried posting about it elsewhere, and didn’t get any solutions.

    It should be simple enough for someone to make a template or instructions or an SSG for people to use. Unfortunately, no one has.

    • readbeanicecream@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      It looks like all it is is an html table styled with css right inside the file. And it is just only big html file. So, in theory, all you would have to do is:

      1. Get the export from reddit (I think it is a .csv)
      2. Convert the CSV to html (there are online converters for that)
      3. Add the CSS that you want.
      4. Find somewhere to host (Like github pages)

      That’s it.

  • r00ty@kbin.life
    0·
    4 months ago

    When I left reddit over the paid api, I left all my posts there.

    But as soon as I heard about the plans re AI, I edited then deleted all content.

    I see no reason why reddit should profit from my intellectual property without even consulting me about it.

    • pbjamm@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      That assumes that your deletions are actually deleted and not just unlinked. Even then they almost certainly still have all that data in the form of backups. There is a near 100% chance it has been sold and used to train LLMs.

  • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
    0·
    4 months ago

    I did it and have not used the account since. Was going to nuke the account but as time went by I figure I might want to rerun the nuke process but I have been to lazy to do so. I have checked it and they have not seem to have accidentally restored stuff so far anyway which I was kinda expecting.

  • rickdg@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    Edit all your posts leaving your own message explaining why you’re removing your content. There are tools to do that that made the rounds a year ago.

  • JetpackJackson@feddit.org
    0·
    4 months ago

    I just deleted the account but not my posts. I still occasionally browse the X-Men and Spider-Man subreddits, but not often