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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What disadvantages? Losing 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t you have to convert all the links into separate pages too? IE:
- https://www.rareddit.com/r/relationship_advice
- https://www.rareddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/qtj2ig/my_friend_tried_to_kiss_my_partner_for_a_tiktok/
That seems like it would need some kind of script.
That person is also archiving full pages. If we use our .csv export it will just be our comments with no context, unfortunately. Better than nothing though.
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 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.
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.
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
r/redditseppuku
Don’t need to juke anything if you never wrote anything…
lol
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.
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.
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?
