Should one remove all Reddit posts and comments?

Cynicus Rex@lemmy.ml to Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 90 points –

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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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".

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.

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.

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.

And why should an American cooperation care about that? They can basically do whatever they want without ever having to fear any consequences.

Remember, when they simply restored accounts, posts, and subreddits that were deleted during the API protests?

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=1 or 0. 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.

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.

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.

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.

What disadvantages? Losing 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.

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

I think it's generally pointless, spiteful, and only harms ordinary users who might someday have found value in coming across your old posts on Reddit from a search. It doesn't harm Reddit itself, the "value" of your individual account is very small compared to their vast archive. And they still have it, deletion just removes it from the public-facing front end. If the reason you're deleting it is because you don't want AI to be trained on it, that ship has long ago sailed. There are downloadable archives of Reddit floating around that it will never be deleted from.

So I wouldn't bother.

Reddit admins have already put things in place to counter editing or deleting comments.

I deleted an account from 2011 yet when I searched on Google for "site:reddit.com account name", it listed loads of posts with their previous content (I used the script that changed all the contents before deleting).

All SM sites have been doing this for a while: they'll shadow delete your account but will retain all the data.

And if they really want to they could restore the comments/posts with randomly generated user names.

Thesis: Nuking your reddit account is good for your mental health

Antithesis: If everyone nuked their reddit accounts, a lot of invaluable information (especially in niche communities) would be lost, and this would primarily hurt average people and not reddit as a corporation

Synthesis: Nuking all reddit accounts is good for society's health. Reddit is a trash website. In the short-term it will hurt, but long-term we are better off moving these communities to decentralized platforms. There are ways to archive the important information from reddit. Reddit thrives off the free contributions of countless users who are paid nothing, and reddit claims ownership and monetizes all content freely published to it. If you don't like reddit, simply stop posting to it, no matter how juicy the bait

Solution: create a static mirror of Reddit for preservation of the single digit percentage worthwhile content, nuke the main site entirely to stop new trash being added to the dumpster fire.

Repeat the process with Twitter, then 4chan or whatever they call it this week.

I did decide to delete all my comments and posts on Reddit. Sure, maybe I've posted some helpful comments, but why support Reddit with their continued existence? Remove content, and people might move to other sites to get their information.

I also decided to keep my account. Turns out some content stayed around, because I could not see and therefore delete it in locked subreddits. So when they came back, the comments came back too, and I was able to delete them, still.

When I left reddit over the paid api, I left all my posts there.

But as soon as I heard about the plans re AI, I edited then deleted all content.

I see no reason why reddit should profit from my intellectual property without even consulting me about it.

That assumes that your deletions are actually deleted and not just unlinked. Even then they almost certainly still have all that data in the form of backups. There is a near 100% chance it has been sold and used to train LLMs.

I mean I could have used the GDPR (still a thing in the UK, at least for now). But didn't see it as worth it. It really wouldn't be worth the risk selling data that was deleted from a GDPR request.

I don't know that they'll risk using the data from deleted posts/comments though anyway. Most comments and posts will be deleted for a reason (moderation, or otherwise mistakes) and as such, likely isn't going to make the best training data really.

It's far easier to just sell the live data and be done with it.

I had a Reddit account I opened in July 2009 that was fairly active and I deleted all my posts and comments when I left - mainly because I felt I couldn’t trust the company that ran it to be good stewards of the content and decided they weren’t entitled to it. All the stuff that’s happened in the last year has just reinforced that conclusion.

Reddit makes money off the content everyone contributes (as well as the hard work of so many unpaid folks doing moderation) and that’s not a model I choose to support. Some of the conversations I was involved in had really help information on a number of topics, and while I’m sad that information isn’t still available to others, I think the overall good is better served by not supporting a site so at odds with my beliefs.

I contributed a lot of comments to the Godot community back when posts didn’t get much interaction, I wouldn’t want those gone. I still come across my own replies when looking up errors!

Fair enough. But a workaround that I have implemented before my previous “Reddit nuke” was saving all my most valuable answers and hosting them on my own website. What I would do now is just replacing all my comments with a link to my website: POSSE, Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Well, almost POSSE, because I'd be removing the actual content from Reddit.

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.

The ideal scenario would be to download your data, then upload it to your own static website before deleting it.

Here's an example of it: https://www.rareddit.com/

But you'd need a static site generator built to do that, and I haven't been able to get a response from the person who made that website. I've tried posting about it elsewhere, and didn't get any solutions.

It should be simple enough for someone to make a template or instructions or an SSG for people to use. Unfortunately, no one has.

It looks like all it is is an html table styled with css right inside the file. And it is just only big html file. So, in theory, all you would have to do is:

  1. Get the export from reddit (I think it is a .csv)
  2. Convert the CSV to html (there are online converters for that)
  3. Add the CSS that you want.
  4. Find somewhere to host (Like github pages)

That's it.

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.

It would require me to visit Reddit and log in. Disgusting thought

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.

Edit it instead of deleting it, but then i doubt it's useful because they can revert everything. Before i moved i did a mass edit using plugin and even after a few days, some comment stay the same while others is successfully edited.

There's just no disadvantage of dumping your abusive SO though.

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.

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.

Loosing vast amounts of historical posts or would I say "cultural heritage" is a shame but I couldn't trust the party hosting it ...

So with Twitter I did the same, 13 years of tweets. Even took a one month payment on a bulk erase / unlike / unfollow / unretweet service to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

I haven't done so personally. A lot of my old activity had to do with helping people with programming questions, so if it's still useful to someone on occasion, I don't feel inclined to remove it.

I left reddit a little over a year ago now, and I don't really care about what goes on over there. I made my statement of displeasure by simply ending all activity on the platform. I figure whatever legacy I left will eventually descend into irrelevance without my having to physically delete it all. At this point, that just sounds like work.

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.

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.

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?

Don't need to juke anything if you never wrote anything...

lol

I just deleted the account but not my posts. I still occasionally browse the X-Men and Spider-Man subreddits, but not often