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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imo you should, before nuking your account, make a backup of everything you said, and maybe some of the surrounding context, and then host it on a website. Just make sure your website is all properly indexed, and shows up when you use the right search terms. I have no idea what the legality of such an undertaking would be, but it would be cool. Or, if you don’t want to bother with that, you could try writing some blog posts based off of the correct answers you gave to obscure questions.
But really, it all depends on what you did with you Reddit account. If you answered people’s obscure questions, you should keep that information. Would someone look up a question you answered? Did you talk a lot in more technical subreddits? Did those arguments you have result in any positive change? But if you spent all your time on big threads with thousands of other people replying, or did a bunch of lurking, maybe your account isn’t worth keeping.
If you account is only of value to you, maybe just downoad a copy of everyhting you’ve said on there, then nuke your account with some tool.
What disadvantages? Loing fake internet points? I deleted every post and comment I had ever made, as well as my account, several years ago. It has negatively impacted my life in exactly zero ways. Look man, no offense, but you’re not erasing the works of Shakespeare over here. The world will keep on turning just fine if you delete your collection of memes and shit posts.
You may be deleting your comments in the hopes that it will pull some value away from Reddit. That’s not true, in fact, the opposite is more likely. They will still keep the deleted posts in their archives, and they will still be able to train their AI models on the content. The difference is that now they get an extra datapoint: these are the kind of comments of someone who left Reddit and deleted their account/comments. If you deleted them right after leaving, that means they can place your account deletion in time around the API changes, which will also contribute to their AI profile.
You may be deleting your comments in the hopes that it will pull some value away from Reddit. That’s not true, in fact, the opposite is more likely.
I would disagree.
If reddit was only about linking websites you would be correct, but that’s not where all the value comes from. Some of the value comes from the comments. Comments provide insights, provide celebrity interaction (snoop, arnold, bill gates, etc), a sense of community, technical knowledge, stories, warnings, context as well as many other things that end-users find valuable.
Remove the comments, ipso facto, you remove value.
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
Don’t need to juke anything if you never wrote anything…
lol
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.
It would require me to visit Reddit and log in. Disgusting thought
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
What does the acronym SO stand for?
Significant Other ie. fiancé/girlfriend/boy friend/wife/husband/whatever you call the other person you live with, and are in love with
significant other, probably
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
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?
