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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It’s too low priority in my life compared to all the real life challenges on my plate right now.
But I would want to save an html file of the entire thread and any media. Then I would host it somewhere in case anyone needed it.
I don’t care about the AI angle. I just don’t want my posts benefiting the site.
If I had tons of time, I’d edit my comments to be carefully crafted nonsense. Maybe by using a cut up machine.
I just deleted the account but not my posts. I still occasionally browse the X-Men and Spider-Man subreddits, but not often
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Get the export from reddit (I think it is a .csv)
- Convert the CSV to html (there are online converters for that)
- Add the CSS that you want.
- Find somewhere to host (Like github pages)
That’s it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
