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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
r/redditseppuku
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.
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.
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 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.
It would require me to visit Reddit and log in. Disgusting thought
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.
