A screenshot, taken way before rexxit, of two comments on reddit, dated “1 year ago”.
The first comment is by a deleted user and the comment has been removed. The second comment is a reply to the deleted comment and it says: “That solved it. Thanks!”
Edit: added temporal context.
This is why I’m not deleting my reddit posts and comments. It’s not worth making the whole world a tiny bit worse just to punish one company.
I respect that, and if Reddit had handled the situation differently, I’d be inclined to agree. But I just do not want them profiting off of my contributions when they’ve shown such utter contempt for their user base and moderators.
Why does one single corporation get sole ownership of your knowledge?
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post elsewhere.
Your knowledge belongs to you, you have the right to take it with you when you leave.
Of course you have the right to be lazy and not do that. Or to say, “I am fine with leaving it for Reddit to sell”.
But please don’t attempt to belittle or minimize the efforts of those who are trying to make a stand.
You are acting like they are doing something wrong (“making the world smaller”) when they are simply deciding that their knowledge will not be monetized by a corporation.
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post elsewhere.
If you believe that what you’ve learned is of value you have to both consider what you’re saying and who can see it. If it’s valuable Reddit is far more discoverable than a corner of the internet. It’s not a matter necessarily of being “lazy”, it’s weighing the medium with the message.
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post somewhere.
It’s not easy either. Reddit sometimes has a particular set of posts that solve queries that are not even answered in stack overflow.
Reddit may have did a massive asshole move, but deleting those things might make things difficult only for people who seek the knowledge, not reddit.
Is ensuring an information monopoly for an unethical, profit-above-else driven corporation making the world better?
Saving the important posts, posting the question and answer to lemmy and then deleting those posts imo would be the most optimal solution. At least the information is available somewhere and not punishing people looking for answers to their queries.
Are Lemmy posts discoverable from normal search engines? If not, then it’s about as useful as the information posted in some obscure Discord chat
If Lemmy becomes the go-to place where the knowledge resides, “regular” search engines will adapt to index communities across the instances.
But it’s the obscure questions that need to be saved
I never posted anything worth preserving over there so my choice was clear lel
Maybe you didn’t. But maybe there was that one thing that was stupid and meaningless to you that someone found great, and others might have also. I respect whatever decision you made though, I understand both sides. It should never have come to the point of people having to make such choices in anger and protest. For money.
lel
Fuck have we really gone that far back? We’ll be back to saying kek before too long at this rate
Bur
roflmao!
I’ve never seen that before and I thank you for correcting that. <3
…least I got chicken!
I’m just old and set in my ways.
kek 👀
4chan is still saying kek
Bring back the kek!
I’m more of a kekw guy. RIP El Risitas
Na, they need to be punished and by extension the world can hate Reddit over it.
Also there is that website that lets you see deleted content.
Still many people don’t know about the caching google does or archive.org unfortunately.
Same I do a lot of tech support and noob assistance.
You could post them here and delete them on reddit.
I came to the same conclusion too. Nuking my shitposting account before leaving was enough to made me feel guilty so I decided to keep the other account that I used for actual problem solving and proper discussions intact for the same reason you mentioned.
All those posts are archived anyway, and anyone can create their own Lemmy instance once Reddit dies, preserving all the content from Reddit.
It looks like it was removed by a mod. If a user deleted it it would have <deleted> in place of comment text rather than <removed>. This user also deleted his account but that wouldn’t delete his posts/comments.
It’s funny to me that people seem to think your posts actually get deleted. I’m 99% sure they are still stored in the DB and deleting them just generates a new line in the DB with [deleted] as the content.
The irony is Reddit is still getting its ad views but users get screwed.
I never said anything that ground breaking there.
Export your Reddit posts and comments, repost them on another platform like Lemmy then delete everything.
Keeping your data on Reddit makes it still worth using and help them.
Exactly, it’s like people burning the library of Alexandria again. And in some cases it doesnt stop traffic. The post with question will often stay. Just removing something because you don’t like someone’s actions… Sounds just like u/spez. And so they’ve become the thing they vowed to destroy.
Devil’s advocate. There’s no such thing as an effective protest that doesn’t inconvenience the public. I’ve heard people say the exact same thing about the blackouts. This protest would not have worked if people could use Reddit normally and totally ignore what was going on. Unlike most protests, none of this does any harm to people IRL so I think people should be OK with being heavy-handed. It’s “oh no, I can’t access reddit to help figure out how to fix my wifi” vs “protests are blocking me on my way to work, causing me to be late and possibly be fired”. The situations just don’t compare.
Beyond that, Reddit has replaced all forums and discussion boards and it’s actually a huge problem in terms of being a single point of failure. It’s a net positive that this issue was highlighted for the non-tech crowd.
Except, it’s not like burning the Library of Alexandria again, because you can find most of those old posts on The Internet Archive. Hell, if you’re too lazy to go search the URL, there are browser extensions that will do it for you.
Obligatory relevant xkcd.
This is why maintaining your account there and keep deleting your comments/posts will destroy Reddit. Do it, you have the power.
I destroyed thirteen years of comment and post history. Is there any reason I should further maintain my account? I’m asking because if there’s something more I can do to screw with their site via my account, I’m all ears.
Make sure your posts are deleted, and sell it to an advertiser. Just look up where to sell. A 13 Year old account will make you a good bit of money, and it will in all likelihood be used to spam the site with an ad campaign.
Man on one hand that would feel cathartic as fuck, and who would mind a bit of extra money, but I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.
I still feel a bit ambivalent about deleting comments in general, like yes it hurts the company, but it also hurts innocent users just looking for answers.
weird to say but once i found a answer for a problem in reddit that wasn’t solved/asked even in stack overflow.
Once? Happened all the time for me
Excellent. I don’t have any other idea yet but I always think it’s better to maintain an account there in case we want to use it. I plan to use my account to refer people to Lemmy for example.
yes but at the same time – isn’t this worse for us, the users, as a whole losing bits of information like this? the fucks up top do not give a shit about any of this
There’s every chance that’s Reddit’s fault and the comment with the answer was deleted within the last month as part of a “burn it down on the way out” protest. If you’re coming from a Google search, it may be annoying, but if you’re posting here about it, you can probably imagine why it was deleted.
I mass edited all of my Reddit comments to say “Deleted” along with a message that I do not want Reddit profiting from my content when they treat their community so poorly. I felt that was more constructive than simply deleting the comments (and risk the admins restoring it if I were to delete my account entirely).
Prior to the shitstorm, I was active in many communities and provided lots of answers to technical topics; those answers are now lost outside of any post archives out there.
Just fyi, I took this screenshot a year ago. This was very common for years already.
Ah, yeah. lol. Morning brain fog had me thinking it was recent.
Actually worse, since you now know there is a solution. Even better when you find other links marking it as solved, that point back to the same place.
I didn’t delete my comments. Mainly because Reddit had been renewing comments after deletion, so why waste my time over a thing out of my control now. But also just in case, for this. I doubt I posted anything very enlightening, but it’s not for me to judge their value. Maybe someone did, and others would.
I just moved on, let things happen however they will.
I guess I’m about to show my age here but this was a problem on forums before Reddit too.
I know and I foolishly didn’t consider that people might jump on the fact that this happens to have been taken on reddit (a year ago). Wasn’t even trying to say anything about anything, just shitposting.
I’m really torn by this. Should all this data be preserved for the betterment of society, or is that what Reddit should get for killing their goose that laid golden eggs…
Mass deleting comments is something that just makes us feel better. Reddit still profited off the post with people clicking on it. They just see a deleted message instead of an answer.
but won’t it eventually fade from search results due to SEO?
I think as long as the original post is up it would hit enough key words but I could be wrong. Deleting the actual post is more effective than the comments.
Yes
deleted by creator
Lol. Like looking for obscure troubleshooting and finding what looks to be the answer on an ancient abandoned forum… Oh wait… Is that reddit now too?
Of course it’s not just deleted, it’s removed by moderators.
Typical Reddit.
Unlike the Great Library at Alexandria, the information contained in many reddit threads is actually available in other places and can be recreated - often by the same person if necessary and relevant.
I understand people not wanting to have that information deleted, but I think the analogy is a bit heavy. For many, it’s a balancing act where the fundamental disagreement with reddit’s cultural evolution outweighs the desire to participate in the knowledge repository.
I think many people were comfortable with their ideas belonging to the communities that spawned on reddit, and they viewed reddit’s ownership as a necessary technicality for the platform to exist. Once reddit clarified that they intended to act on that ownership, many people no longer wanted to participate.
I think they have that right.
More importantly, who owns our thoughts in this space?
If it says removed doesn’t that mean its a mod (or admin) action? My understanding is that it would say deleted if the user removed it.
Still infuriating when you’re looking for information that was removed, for whatever reason.
Moderator action. Reddit’s AEO edits it to [ Removed by Reddit ], even to the point where the author cannot see the comment’s content anymore. Always great when you try to appeal a ban and don’t even know what the comment said in the first place.
It’s what it looks like if you delete your comment.
If it was an admin it would say something like “this comment has been removed by admins” or something similar. I’ve seen it happen a few times before I left the site.
[deleted] by [deleted] is when you remove the message yourself. [removed] by [deleted] if it was removed by mods. [Removed by Reddit] by [deleted] if it was done by the admins (?), if the message is still there but the username is [deleted], they deactivated their account themselves.
And if you get suspended, unless the admins wipe your account clean as well the message as well as the poster name stay as is.
I see lots of them. Unpopular opinion but I think going back and deleting every single comment you made is an over the top method of protesting the API charges. Lots of interesting conversations are now gone forever.
deleted by creator
Yeah, I gave advice on some smaller / niche, topics. I didn’t delete the whole thing, only my most upvoted and/or most recent comments (I went all the way to december 2022, and every comment with more than 20 upvotes). Replaced it all with a link to my kbin.
It was kind of sad reading all the replies that were like “we should put this comment in the FAQ / this is the best comment / this covers everything”. I was very throughout and loved speading what I learned, and it pains me a little the few times I lurked in those communities since moving to kbin and see lots of unanswered pleads for advice or straight up terrible advice being given…
I think you’re going to begin to see a lot of that on Reddit. I overwrote and delete my ~10 years of comments and posts before deleting my account. I imagine a significant number of others have/will too.
