Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
Time to start building all that library of knowledge on the fediverse
Exactly. Waiting for some communities to get formed (I don’t want to run them or be a moderator). Some have started but low activity, especially in the health genre.
I’m really excited for the fediverse. I also knew that patience would prevail on lemmy world as they deal with growth. Today has been amazing to see all the updates they did to improve performance.
Finding all sorts of cool stuff on many instances to subscribe to. I’m actually starting to like this more than Reddit w/Apollo which is crazy to even say.
That’s why I saved a backup of my comments before I edited/wiped them all on Reddit.
When I get time I’ll go through all 10 years worth of the backup to find information I can share again here.
It’s hard to imagine the library of Alexandria had more info than Reddit
The Library of Alexandria burned down. So can Reddit.
I find it problematic that Reddit thinks it can just sell all the content it’s users created. I like that people are deleting everything, making the site less useful, but it is sad losing all of that knowledge. I hope it reappears in the fediverse.
Imagine if Wikipedia changed its financial model. That would be a major, major problem.
I stripped years of posts off of r/vans when I realized my submissions were almost always the top results on Google images when searching basic keywords (not gaming the search). I’ve built !vans@lemmy.world here and I’ve been posting my content from reddit here.
The thought of leaving my content on reddit and driving further traffic to that site just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Imagine my surprise hoping to see some sweet converted rides and got sneaks, lol.
I should buy a pair though.
Haha that would occasionally happen on r/vans. Was always great when someone posted an actual van without checking the sub out first.
I love your approach and hope it becomes the model for others. Anyone that contributes a lot should build a community that is not attached to any of the main for profit social media companies.
never found this community on reddit, but im glad you’re here, seems like a fun time. /subscribe
Awesome! Happy to have you!
I was pleasantly surprised to see sneakers instead of vans like the car. I subbed thanks to you. Thank you!
It’s crazy how some of the communications from their CEO has been.
He clearly thinks he owns all the content on the platform and even called the third party app users ‘freeloaders’ when a ton of them were top contributors to the platform.
Stupid me thinking that buying awards for excellent content was the only compensation Reddit needed (along with memberships).
Boy was I wrong. I’m hoping Lemmy World will get awards that we can award others to help offset server costs.
I think the current method is better. You can subscribe / donate to main developers working on Lemmy and assist with their server costs. Donation links are accessible on Lemmy’s github page.
More users should take all their contributions off. Especially if they are informative big posts. Reddit served as a platform that many people trusted, now it’s gone to a for profit model and blindsided all the people that never signed up for that.
He also said the mods - the ones who provide all the unpaid labor to moderate everything posted by unpaid content contributors - act like “landed gentry”. It’s almost like he’s trying to piss everyone off.
In a lot of subs it was like that though, to be fair.
Some mods go around collecting subs like cards. I’ve seen certain subs where the mods didn’t really bother protesting, or even did protests that actually drove traffic and platform engagement (r/awww and r/videos) because the thought of being removed from their positions of power was too much to handle.
These kind of mods felt like they ‘owned’ the subreddit in the same way spez thought he ‘owned’ everything. It was not free labour for them, they loved doing it and controlling content streams. If they were asked to pay money to stay as mod, they probably would.
Sorry if this post offends any of the good mods. If you are more likely to say ‘the sub I moderate’ over ‘my sub’ then you are probably one of the good ones, my statements don’t apply, and the whole ‘landed gentry’ thing is incredibly offensive.
Right? Completely disregarding the fact that all content is user generated and moderated by volunteers. I raged when I saw that statement.
I think the mentality at reddit leadership has changed just about 180° since it started. It’s not just Steve Huffman, although he is leading it.
Originally they were part of building a community, and users were part of that community.
Now they have become an ordinary business, who believe they are providing a service that should not just be sustainable but monetized as much as possible, and users are no longer a real community, but merely users of a service for profit. No different from Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.
But it’s a simple service, not more than a fancy forum, where users provide the content. It’s doubtful the service is valuable enough, to allow drawing out much money on advertising before users go elsewhere. And when the users go, so does the content, which can easily turn into a death spiral.
It’s basically Usenet with nicer formatting :)
This is what stopped me from doing it. I always feel like if I’ve helped make one person’s day a little bit better, then I’ve done my bit as a human.
I know how good it is when you have a really complex, niche, problem and someone gives the answer you exactly needed, and I don’t want to take that away from the public, even though a company I don’t support is profiting off my comments and submissions.
Yeah I feel the same as a big preservationist. I feel that I got value from Reddit before, now I don’t anymore but that doesn’t take away what I benefitted from previously.
So instead I edited my top 30 comments and added something to the effect of “As of Jul 2023 I’m on lemmy kthxbye”.
This is a better solution in my view 👍
I don’t know why your approach didn’t occur to me but that’s a great idea. Deleting all my content would pain me both as someone who has been able to help people with my posts and as a digital anthropologist, but making it known why I’m no longer engaging with the platform while preserving that content is a good balance between disengaging and purging.
When you can’t trust the company not to paywall your contribution or hold it hostage, it’s time to sever ties and do what you can to kill the platform. Every new contribution to Reddit is a further waste of our collective efforts. The sooner the platform dies the sooner contributors move somewhere else where their posts will be in safer hands.
Wikipedia entre database is open for download. It’s under a license which means that anyone may host another Wikipedia clone at any time.
Don’t worry about data from Wikipedia - it should be safe. Totally different beast than Reddit.
Yup, I usually download a snapshot every year or so. It’s more because I feel ways about digital archival, but it’s super convenient to be able to access that information offline as well.
damn isnt your hard drive full by now? Only downloading the text content or also all the other media like images/video/sound files?
Don’t think it’s lost, I think /r/DataHoarders saved a raw copy.
I went and deleted 15 years of reddit comments and posts, editing them before deleting. End of an era for me
I assume there’s at least someone out there who has a full download of Wikipedia on their computer, ready to go up as soon as the website decides it wants to go to shit.
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I can’t imagine reading through a full TOS. I know I should be, but damn, I wouldn’t have much time for anything else in life if I read all these ridiculously long TOS that companies put out.
10 years of angularjs, angulat, react, and c# answers to problems just disapeared from reddit last week as i wiped all my accounts
As a developer, this hits deep. RIP quality answers & search results for c# (in my case) related quedtions
The thing is - when I gave good answers, I mostly wrote them in Obsidian - so that I have Marktext files with my most interesting answers anyway.
So they haven’t gone, they just don’t exist inside Reddit any more. Anyone with the same questions could still get them - if there were an equivalent alternative to whatever subreddit exists.
In the case of Linux answers, however, I don’t give a toss - because one of the worst things about Reddit is that the best repository of information for any distribution should be the official forum for that distribution… and interestingly, I suffered zero pain using my official forum, whilst Reddit mods seem to enjoy kicking you out for a day or three for telling someone to format queries in a useful way.
Don’t worry, chatGPT and other AIs have already trained off of reddit and probably hold that information
AI is your friend! I already use a mix of Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT for the really difficult problems. I just do tier 2 support, though.
Hopefully Lemmy starts to fill that hole in as more people join and more questions asked then answered.
Yeah, mine was more related to Shopify, eCommerce and health matters. Your stuff was highly technical and took time to share. I still say bravo.
Congrats on becoming the dead mediafire link that fixed the next 5 replies.
Many are waiting for their data takeout requests to complete before doing the same. And to follow up with GDPR requests/GDPR deletion requests.
All to improve their quarter numbers pre-IPO.
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If you don’t trust the reddit admins, why do you think that they wouldn’t keep a history of your comments, and just revert the gibberishification?
That is pretty much why I have not deleted my account yet. I have edited and deleted all my contributions, but the script misses subs that are locked down. So I check periodically if my content is still deleted, or if new comments are back from being locked down and need to be purged as well.
I’ve been googling my username and find comments still around that aren’t on my profile.
Every few days I go through and manually scrub. It’s the main reason I haven’t deleted the account.
This makes me sad. Information is being erased that will keep people who could’ve been helped by it from ever finding it.
The people who it will hurt the most have nothing to do with Reddit.
Sad, yes. And I’m willing to admit that it would hurt the people who have nothing to do with Reddit.
But if it keeps those people away from Reddit, see Reddit as not the place to find information, see Reddit as a place that was, full of [deleted] comments, see Reddit as an awful dumpster fire, it is worth it.
It’s too easy to see Reddit as the Library of Alexandria, but it isn’t. It was a place where people willingly shared information to other people, sure, but it now isn’t, and it’s more important for people to be made aware of that: It is no longer a place for sharing information.
EDIT: Typos and shit.
Yeah that’s why I’ve decided to leave my account on there. I’m sure some of my posts may be helpful.
I originally left some posts I thought may be useful but I deleted them now. We need to bite the bullet and build that knowledge up again here. If we leave the content behind, people will keep going to reddit as their first stop and keep asking questions there + feeding the ads instead of coming here.
Yea, I’m leaving my account active but just not posting with it anymore. I only use reddit on my desktop now to view the few subreddits that have not moved to a new site/forum yet.
There’s too much useful information on reddit going away. I understand the sentiment and the act of protest, but it’s still painful to the common man.
I know it sounds like a shitty thing to do but the point is to hurt these people who are looking for help, who will then look for and hopefully contribute to a community elsewhere, which will harm Reddit in the long run. it sucks for people looking for help in the meantime
Yeah, would be nice to have a script that went through old comments and just addended them to say " edit - July 2023: please don’t respond to this, I won’t see it, I’ve moved on to Lemmy. Come [ join me] (Lemmy hyperlink)!
Yep. This is the reason I left all my posts and comments up on Reddit. I can get over the fact Reddit is making money off what I posted if I am helping people in the future.
Completely agree, it’s like when Youtube removed dislikes, it’s not helping people, it just makes things more complicated.
There’s one important distinction to be made here:
- Youtube, the company, removed dislikes.
- Reddit users, individually, out of their own volition, removed their comments.
You’re free to leave your own comments over there, no one’s forcing you to delete them. Youtube, on the other hand, forced their decision on others, regardless of whether they wanted it or not.
Of the two evils, one being allowing a shitty company profiting off of your work, and the other depriving people of easy answers - The latter is the lesser of the two.
Chat GPT can give you most answers, otherwise make a new thread.
There aren’t enough people doing this for it to have an effect. You guys don’t seem to see the broader picture. This is nothing.
By that logic, there is no point in voting.
I get it. But I also hate how useless the internet has now become for me. Kept trying to do research on a topic the other day and kept ending up at private subreddits or reddit comments with nothing but deleted comments. It will take years (if ever) for that kind of knowledge to grow again. I’m just completely at the mercy of random SEO crap reviews or gut instinct now when I need to research stuff to buy.
The reality is that as long as we’re making centralized platforms driven purely by profit the center of knowledge we’re going to keep burning the Library Of Alexandria.
Even if everyone wasn’t removing their comments and making subs private, that content only continues to exist online for as long as it provides reddit some form of value. The value it provides you and others is only significant in so far as it serves reddits immediate profit motives. The moment they determine they can’t meet their revenue goals they will shut it all down.
The only solution if we want to stop repeating this cycle is to go back to more sustainable models of distributed content, rather than the VC backed blitzscaling and hyper centralization that we know as social media today.
Lemmy (hopefully) fits the bill for this type of solution. Though it still sucks that we have to burn Alexandria again to depart in that direction
I guess my question is how does Lemmy solve this problem in particular? Maybe I don’t understand it fully, but is there anything stopping an instance from shutting down and losing all the content associated with that instance? Users still have the ability to delete their posts and comments, don’t they? I do think there are many benefits to the decentralized system, but in these specific ways I’m not seeing a tangible benefit.
I do understand. The problem is, I’m hearing that Reddit is testing the idea of forcing people to log in. At that point, SEO becomes worthless as the spiders can’t crawl the data to even suggest it to you in the first place.
The fact of the matter is, Reddit is bloated in staff and expenses. They are already monetizing everyone’s content with awards and ads from users using their site and app. Now they are double-dipping with the API used by many to submit content.
They chose to bite the hands that feed them so many of us decided to stop serving them food, including the leftovers.
Hopefully Elon’s little tantrum over the weekend has scared them enough not to do it. But I doubt it has
Who were you denvercoder9? What did you see?!
Have you tried excluding reddit from your search results? Don’t forget reddit is nothing but a regurgitation of the internet. The info you want is still out there.
Reddit is a collection of people’s thoughts and opinions. So no, I’m not sure that information is elsewhere. Where for example can I find a community like buy it for life? Or the home automation community? What Google served to me instead were corporate ads, not real user experience and opinions on products
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I didn’t decide to break up with reddit. I was happy with reddit. Reddit dumped me.
Because Reddit is still a recent ex
I do have to admit I felt a little bad when Digg started sending “We miss you” emails, but I held my ground.
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It was all outdated. That’s why I got some many private messages from people wanting updates. Copying it all over would have been copying over inaccurate data from years ago.
That will probably be a copyright violation as all your comments and posts belong to Reddit.
Half of reddit is screenshots of twitter posts and reuploads of snapchat videos.
They may claim it’s their intellectual property, but it isn’t.
It’s your data, you have the right to delete it, you have the right to amend it, you have the right to repost it somewhere else.
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I don’t think reddit or any social media company gains copyright or ownership of what you post
There’s no guarantee that what’s being posted even belongs to or is the original creation of the poster.I’m not sure where Reddit has landed on this, but I know some social media platforms explicitly reject ownership of certain types of content… Because if they insist they own it, they become responsible for it at a higher threshold.
If I start posting a bunch of hate speech in a niche, poorly moderated subreddit… Suddenly Reddit would be on the hook for that.
I know the laws in the USA aren’t super tight on that kinda thing but in Europe you can hit some pretty rough consequences pretty quickly.
Lol sue me
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The stack exchange network does claim ownership. Their whole business model is to have a site where users post technical answers to questions, then sue business where an employee copy pasted code blurbs from one of their sites.
I avoid those sites when searching for technical answers for code I’m writing, though I’ll sometimes use them for more meta questions (like how to get some tool to do some specific thing).
But it is interesting in that someone could post a code blurb that they didn’t own in the first place and now stack exchange will go forward acting as if they do own it. I wonder if that will eventually be their downfall because it seems like a situation that could even be baited deliberately. Hell, they could even already have fraudulent cases tried and/or settled.
dont talk if you dont know buddy
The reason people keep claiming posts are being “restored” by Reddit or “missed” by these tools is that those posts were deleted while many subs were private. Which means the posts/comments were hidden. When the subs came back under restricted/public, then hidden posts/comments became visible again.
On top of that, it’s been alleged that Reddit’s weird caching limits the display of your posts/comments to a surprisingly low number (I’ve seen 1000 and 5000). Meaning stuff older than that is simply not locatable other than through third-party search tools. I haven’t seen concrete proof of this, though, and I definitely saw 12yo comments being found and deleted when I ran tools on my account. It IS, however, clear that Reddit does not respect data privacy laws that require they delete all posts on a user’s request. They demand the user do it themselves while simultaneously not providing tools to do so.
EU’s GDPR officers will be very interested in Reddit’s documented inability to delete EU Reddit users’ personal data.
But is a Reddit users post and comment history personal data? If it was submitted freely and not asked for by Reddit as some kind of sign up or usage rights does it fall under GDPR.
Of course data that can be used to identify an individual comes under GDPR so in that case it’s only the users email address and name. Even the user name doesn’t identify an individual.
I am no fan of Reddit but we need to be careful thinking GDPR gives an individual the right to remove non personal content.
I’ve seen the explanation that deletion while the sub was private somehow nullified the action. However I’ve also seen anecdotal mentions of people finding things they deleted long before all this happened reappearing. Just like on a typical hard drive*, Reddit doesn’t actually delete, they just mark it as not viewable to appease the user, and they have backups of data that doesn’t get removed regardless.
- that’s why data recovery tools can find deleted files. The difference is that Reddit doesn’t overwrite the “deleted” stuff, it’s just archived for “reasons”.
I read the admin post about that and I tend to believe them on that issue. I’ve never seen a post I deleted get restored. Just rando posts come back from years ago as subreddits return.
Now I wonder how long until search engines penalize Reddit for this stuff. They still have me ranked #1 to several posts that shows it’s been removed.
There has to be a manual quality penalty coming.
I have subs where I had some posts/comments deleted and others not. (I know because I was the originator of the post, which was deleted, but some of my comments in it were not removed).
I have comments spanning and wide swath of time still floating out there.
Fun times.
My posts/comments shouldn’t have been viewable in my profile if the sub was hidden or private. I didn’t post much, thankfully, but the edit-then-delete script I used was hit or miss. When everything came back, many didn’t contain the new edited text, but had the old actual post contents.
After my stuff came back the first time I manually edited them all to say [removed] then deleted them.
I had to do it a total of 4 times. It would say it was deleted on my end and my profile page would be empty, then in 1 or 2 days they would be back (most still saying [removed], at least). All the subs had been made public again, so there’s no excuse for it.
The last time I did it, I spread it out over a week, occasionally deleting one then leaving it alone for a couple hours. The few that returned in their entirety I would edit with the [removed] text then wait again. They haven’t shown back up yet but I’m going to keep checking. We’ll see.
I also noticed the up/down ration changed every time I refreshed the page, even if it was just minutes apart. They may be having issues with so many post removals going on.
Anyway… 4 attempts to delete my posts is 3 too many.
I made a post about a niche subject. It is one of the top 3 google results and the only in depth review, outside of YouTube. Deleted it last week. Feelsgood.mpeg
Hey, why not repost it on this site?
We need a /c/ for “ArchivedFromElsewhere” or something. Simple a place for people to dump their conversations they want saved from oblivion and accessible to the public, but not in the hands of spez.
No context needed, just post it there and let it be what it is.
Honestly, lack of interest. If a post fails to gain any discussion, I just move on.
Will Google searches eventually link to lemmy? I don’t really know how this site works, but I would assume that could grow the site more than anything else would.
My Google search today linked to a technology@lemmy.ml post so it’s happening
That’s absolutely awesome!
Now you just have to start weaning yourself off Google - it’s more evil than Reddit.
i really doubt it. there is not much impact on reddit and the protest showed that, before 3p apps shut down.
That’s an interesting perspective, but I’m not really asking about Reddit. I’m wondering about how Lemmy can grow on its own
My opinion is that, rather than thinking it can instantly aggregate the web, it would be the best solution for anyone wanting to get a group of people with common interests together in a relatively safe place.
thats true, i kind of taken your comment out of context. i just assume thats the general conversation.
For you as a personal user, the protest might have been an inconvenience at most, but I don’t know about the impact it had on potential investors. Think about it this way: would you invest in a new IPO when their users, who provide all of the content and moderation, are willing to subvert the whole premise of the company? I surely fucking wouldn’t.
willing to but couldn’t do it?
I have 650k comment karma on my profile. Time to delete my comments that were so helpful.
My plan is to delete all my content, but leave my profile intact, so posterity can see what a prolific contributor I was, but not see any of my content.
I just deleted my 8 years Reddit account yesterday. With the help of some lines of code, still took me roughly an hour to wipe out all my posts and comments all these years. It does feel bittersweet but I don’t feel the need to leave behind all my tracks on Reddit. After all they don’t get to have that. This is what I used to delete my data on Reddit, if someone needs that here’s the link: https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-delete-all-reddit-comments-posts/
It hurts my soul knowing all of this useful content was removed from reddit.
I’ve moved on to Lemmy, but I’m having a hard time removing everything from reddit. I know with so many people removing their old posts/replies that it will definitely hurt reddit, so many googled content won’t be there.
It would be cool if we could transfer our old posts here in some sort of meaningful way, but I don’t see how that could happen in a way that makes sense.
Libreddit.hu has been super helpful. No user log in; can subscribe to subreddits via cookies and it doesn’t give Reddit any traffic. I use it to browse some subs like Credibledefense
I think for now, you can export your content. Perhaps in the future someone will create a tool to reimport those on lemmy.
I was active on several subs with a known username and had some high karma r/askhistorians posts. No ragrets.
I tried to deleted mine as well.
Then I searched my username via Google and found a ton of comments that were not deleted.
Yep. I’m just periodically running a delete script and getting a few at a time at this point.
No ragrets.
For sure, if anyone sees a ‘ragret’ it would be deleted immediately ;)
Haha, I once had a post removed for being too scientific. :( I was explaining a climate shift that would have caused people to wear different things at the time. I’m hoping to move some of these like that one to a blog in time.
