Reddit is telling protesting mods their communities ‘will not’ stay private

OrangeCorvus@feddit.ro to Technology@beehaw.org – 47 points –
Reddit is telling protesting mods their communities ‘will not’ stay private
theverge.com
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I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.

We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.

Reddit chose to be non profitable in order to kill off all internet forums.

It's reddit that's changing the terms, not mods acting up.

It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.

Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.

For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it's flight or drive.

Like everything else. Big money buys out competition and then kills off anything that is not profitable enough. Parasitic private equity take all the money.

Of course smaller companies serving markets the big guys don't want to bother with isn't actually competition. But the big guys want to crush them anyway. So stupid.

That's incredibly sad, and as the other commenter suggested, all too common with big daddy capitalism. I can't describe how angry it makes me, and how powerless those situations make me feel at times. I'm so happy, and proud, when I see communities truly fight back - and I can fight along side then. So often we go out with a wimpe, I want to fight for the things important to me!

There are reports they are undeleting content. The only option is to stop participating.

Seems the person that spread that was mistaken.

They deleted content that was in public subreddits, then when the privated subreddits started going public again, the posts he made in those became visible again, making it seem certain content he deleted was being undeleted.

So far, there's been no verifiable report of actual undeletion of content.

But besides all that, with GDPR and the similar California laws, Reddit is already asking to get sued and get the EU on their ass, for not deleting peoples data on request, as compliance requires.

"The person that spread that?" Are you being serious? That's happened to a lot of people. It's happened to me repeatedly. In fact I'm right now yet again deleting a bunch of posts that stayed deleted for days and are mysteriously back again.

Yeah, that previous explanation makes no sense -- the YT guy who recorded his entire session was deleting the same stuff over and over again.

That sounds like a server error.

Don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that Reddit has decided to go to war with any unhappy users. I have zero respect left.

Out of self-respect, I will still try to understand whether something is a bug or deliberate.

Are you certain it is the exact same comment or post? I think people are deleting everything (via scripts or whatever--some scripts are known to not work/only appear to be working--particularly ones that make use of pushshift which reddit destroyed a few months prior to this incident), but everything isn't actually everything because of the way reddit hides content in certain situations. When people have posted screenshots it has been content from subreddits that had be set private during protests and reopened. Reddit annoyingly hides your own content from yourself in many circumstances.

I'm not saying these undeletes definitely do not happen, but people have needed to delete content on Reddit for reasons the pre-date the protests. The legal risks to reddit for them to be caught restoring content that a user deliberately deleted is significant. So unless a whistleblower or compelling evidence emerges Occam's razor will go with reddit bugs and "features". Everyone knows reddit is bug-ridden.

I've just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like "-> fediverse". So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don't have value to anyone anyway so I'm just ordering by most impact until I get bored.

Not participating isn't the only choice.

On days I'm feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I'm that petty.

I'd skip the vote one, it's just giving them a bit more traffic stats. Agree with the edit though.

If you wanna be petty, edit your posts into contextual nonsense that looks like it fits, so Reddit gets just a little harder to read.

Damn that's a good idea. Sort by highest karma and make them word soup that makes readers question their sanity. I just went with '.'

Most of that was from subs coming back online. You can only delete visible content. I've been going back every few days and deleting the stuff that came back online.

Engagement is what drives social media. Upvotes, likes, page views, searches are the fuel for their algorithms. (Or at least that's what it seems to me.)

For what it's worth, I used Power Suite Delete to replace everything in my 14 year account with a deleted message, haven't seen anything get reverted yet.

That will come automatically once my 3rd party app doesn't work any more. Hopefully some Lemmy apps will be available in the App Store soon. The website on mobile is quite suboptimal.

we should delete our content so they have to create their own.

Any content that users have posted to reddit became theirs with the TOS you had to agree to first. They've already undeleted user submitted content deleted as part of the protests. I agree it's time to cut them loose and move on, but you won't be able to retroactively stop them from profiting off the content they already have.

A TOS doesn't supersede actual LAW.

I live where the laws are less helpful. EU and California have the helpful ones. But as a non-resident, my understanding is that the law allows full removal of personal info. Deleting posts would be selective removal and doesn't have the "and I live in the right place" question.