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?
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r/redditseppuku
Obscure old reddit posts saved my ass so many times when coming across random tech problems. So while I understand why people delete their accounts, from a personal point of view I appreciate when people leave them up.
Yeah, not actively supporting reddit anymore is one thing, but with deleting every comment/post you basically just hurt users. Reddit doesn’t give a fuck.
You won’t believe how often I search for a problem only to find 50 "Thank you"s for a deleted comment.
You won’t believe how often I search for a problem only to find 50 "Thank you"s for a deleted comment.
That just means it’s working. It causes people to search info elsewhere
That means the info is gone and nowhere to be found anymore. Yeah, post it somewhere else from now on, but don’t delete your old stuff.
reddit is not the entire internet. Your inability to find info without using Google to search reddit posts says more about your habits than it does the state of the internet.
Reddit not being the entire internet doesn’t mean that every bit of information on reddit is also available elsewhere.
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
I haven’t done so personally. A lot of my old activity had to do with helping people with programming questions, so if it’s still useful to someone on occasion, I don’t feel inclined to remove it.
I left reddit a little over a year ago now, and I don’t really care about what goes on over there. I made my statement of displeasure by simply ending all activity on the platform. I figure whatever legacy I left will eventually descend into irrelevance without my having to physically delete it all. At this point, that just sounds like work.
Use that deletion app several times, separated by months.
It can edit the posts, include random stuff and conspiracy stuff.
Sonetimes stop it partway through.
In short, yes they have “something”, but what do they have?
With duck duck go not really showing reddit results anymore, I’d say it doesnt matter. I’m finding more forums for niche things that generally are more helpful instead of full of trolls and inb4 posts.
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!
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.
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.
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.
And if they really want to they could restore the comments/posts with randomly generated user names.
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
That’s illegal within the EU.
The GDPR also gives “right to be forgotten”.
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.
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.
@breadsmasher @lnxtx Every post from any person contains personal information. At least the fact, that the person has posted that specific sentence or maybe only shared a link at that time.
Sure, not disagreeing. Its a shame its barely enforced
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.
You post on Lemmy aren’t safe from OpenAI either. They could just scrape entire Fediverse easily than Reddit.
The difference is that OpenAI’s competitors and open-source projects can also use fediverse posts.
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.
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.
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=1or0. 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.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.
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.
You should remove old posts & comments from every site you post to on a regular basis. There is no reason for those pictures from 2007 being on Facebook. Your old Twitter comments from 2011 might bit you in the ass in a few years. Nobody in their right mind is looking at your 2014 Instagram posts and you don’t want people out of their right mind seeing those. Why should that comment about Obamas election still be available for the world? Just nuke your old stuff on a regular basis - nobody looks at it and if people are searching through your old posts, they want to harm you.
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.
Loosing vast amounts of historical posts or would I say “cultural heritage” is a shame but I couldn’t trust the party hosting it …
So with Twitter I did the same, 13 years of tweets. Even took a one month payment on a bulk erase / unlike / unfollow / unretweet service to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
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.
I changed every link in my posts, then deleted every post, replaced every comment with excerpts from literature in the public domain, then replaced the modified comments with gibberish before deleting them. Was that enough? No, but still better than allowing Reddit to profit from me without any effort. If they want my shit, they’ll have to pull from archive, and even then it might be a bit of Moby Dick.
