Is there any benefit to editing all of my comments before deleting my Reddit account?
I was thinking of replacing all of my comments with either lorem ipsum, or something intended to poison the well for the AI.
i just delete all of mines and be done with it.
I’m very much not a fan of this approach. Preservation of conversation history on the web is valuable to real humans who may have bookmarked pages or be searching for obscure info.
And I’d have to imagine the whole corpus from past years has probably already been fed through AI. Besides that, editing/deleting comments probably only hides them from other users, Reddit may very well keep them saved (or at least have backups).
Best thing anyone can do, IMO, is avoid giving them new traffic and content. Attention is the currency they deal in, and most of it comes from people browsing new content.
I see where you’re coming from, but leaving the content gives a reason for people to go to the site for that information. I wish there were a separate place to put your comments and posts before erasing it from Reddit.
Any backup method still contributes pretty heavily to linkrot. But maybe for any significant comments or submissions, make sure archive.org or archive.is has the page. That’s something anyway.
I can understand not wanting to leave them any scraps, but my preference for balance still falls toward leaving the old and deciding to focus on changing the future.
This is probably true. Also, I think I would have to do this manually and I am lazy so there is that.
Besides that, editing/deleting comments probably only hides them from other users
I didn’t bother, but I thought that was the point? Don’t underestimate the search result factor.
I suppose there’s truth to that, yeah - I get it, but just don’t think the tradeoff is worth it. I know Reddit probably loves the whole “add reddit add the end of your search query” thing people do, and they probably do get some onboarding from it. But my conjecture is that ongoing everyday traffic and content is more important for them, and if that were to dry up the value of the general purpose search results would follow. In my mind, deleting old content disproportionately affects users vs the company.
And just personally, I see value in the old stuff still being there. For many years people put worthwhile information there, and the website wasn’t so aggravatingly user hostile. In the present day, I think the energy is much better spent trying to make alternatives more appealing. Make an account on Lemmy or something, add a post to a community here, that kind of thing.
For ai the effects will be minimal since data is backed up but it will inconvenience users making reddit less valuable.
IF you’re going to delete your comments (which I don’t think is necessarily a good thing, though it could be good for you individually) you should leave a message about why you left in their place. Make it into a protest.
I also considered this. My thought was to outline a few reasons, with receipts, as to why I have left Reddit. I would also mention Lemmy as an alternative.
This would be a very productive use of your time comrade. 🫡
If doing it makes you feel better, that’s all the point you need. Yes, it may be a useless waste of time, but that’s secondary. If it’s something you want to do, don’t let the possibility of backups stop you.
I went scorched earth. Ran a script that deleted my comments one by one then deleted my account. Kind of wish I replaced all my comments with Luigi’s manifesto.
I think that’s a waste of time. Because chances are likely, there’s unedited versions backed up and archived.
Yep, deleted comments will still sometimes show up in Google search results for years.
It was proven here during the appocalypse. Someone here was a major player in some tech support sub always answering questions. He used one of those account scrubbers when he left and when he looked all his answers had been put back.
Account scrubbing does nothing
I have a two-edged sword kind of an opinion regarding these archival methods places like what Reddit does.
It should put it into perspective, how careful you have to be with yourself more than ever with today’s internet. Nobody will ever forget because it will most likely never be deleted, even if you went out of your way to purge things. Don’t share or tell things to strangers online that you wouldn’t even tell your closest loved ones in person. Doing so, sets you up for a unaccounted personal disaster that you won’t escape from.
However, people should simply be allowed to purge and not have certain things haunt them. It is already disturbing in Facebook’s case where you think you’ve moved on from deleting things. But as soon as you create a new account, suddenly you’re pitched contacts that are too familiar to you. People you wanted to forget about, almost as if Facebook has trained it’s algorithms from it’s many data server farms, to specifically never letting you forget.
It is insane there are people who are that devoid of reality and morbidly obsessed with archiving and keeping track of everyone’s data.
Aye. That is probably true.
Deleting comments on reddit is about as effective as on Lemmy
From my understanding, if you actually do the mass edit thing, you need to do it at least twice. They have a backup and can revert your edits…
Ugh. Doing it once would be a task for my main account.
I haven’t bothered yet, but if I ever do, I’m thinking the first edit would replace every comment with FUCK SPEZ!!!
Then the second edit would replace every comment with pure random garbage text.
Then, if they decide to revert the random text edits, welp, FUCK SPEZ!!!
I think this got a lot harder when they shut down the API.
Yeah. I was thinking I would have to do this manually.
I’ve seen many people do lemmy ads lol
Honestly destroy the knowledge you put on reddit. Make “lemmy” the word tossed in Google searches for genuine answers.
No. Reddit already has them archived. All you’ll do is inconvenience real humans who might come across them via a search engine at some point in the future.
All you’ll do is inconvenience real humans who might come across them via a search engine at some point in the future.
reducing the value of reddit’s corpus.
that’s worth it right there.
Reddit already has his content archived. Deleting it won’t remove it from Reddit, they can still sell their corpus to whomever they want.
