Unpopular opinion: deleting your Reddit account is 100% justified, but mass-scrambling all of your posts and comments with an online tool is worse than leaving them as is

AndreTelevise@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 3 points –

I might get "cancelled" for this, but hear me out:
If you remove your account bad actors won't be able to identify you unless they put in the effort. Reddit staff will revert popular comments and posts to the way they were before the Blackout. Mass-scrambling your posts and comments with a "f*ck Spez", followed by a long chain of "A"s or whatever, annoys people who are just trying to find an answer to something on Reddit, and it doesn't help anybody except the user's feelings.
The preservation of information comes above some moral feeling.
Your opinion?

34

Overwriting your comments erodes Reddit’s long-standing search engine advantage, so I support it.

When Reddit took my Apollo away, it told me I don’t matter. I treated my comment history in kind.

More to the point, I took it off of reddit, but moved it onto the fediverse. Folks who need that advice I wrote many years ago will still be able to find it, they just have to look elsewhere than reddit for it.

On the other hand, it makes spammy articles from content farms the primary resource to find answers.
And either way, not everybody is doing this, so Reddit retains part of its usability, which still exists, and some portion of people will still use Reddit after the API changes.

Or it forces search providers to actually fix their shit rather than relying on our labor.

On the other hand, it makes spammy articles from content farms the primary resource to find answers.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but Reddit is a spammy content farm, too.

I didn't choose any of this. Reddit made the first move. Maybe Steve Huffman should consider second-order consequences.

My opinion is that you have a dumb take, because Reddit does not give a shit about preserving information, their priority is making money.

Why the fuck would they care about being stewards to knowledge? That's Wikipedia's job, not Reddit.

So fuck them, I'm glad I'm making their toxic behavior encouraging cash grab site a shithole with my edited gibberish comments.

Why the fuck would they care about being stewards to knowledge? That's Wikipedia's job, not Reddit.

Wikipedia does not have articles about fixing certain issues or bugs on videogames (or software in general) Reddit does

Someone has an issue, someone write a reply with a possible fix. That's mainly the use of reddit (at least for me). People editing their posts will let other people from the future who may have that specific issue with no solutions

Damn, that's crazy.

Maybe someone should make a distributed non-corporate website that isn't tied to toxic profitable advertising models so people could discuss and post solutions to technical issues without fear of that content being removed due to their CEO arbitrarily deciding he wants to make more money by stroking the cocks of his advertising sponsors and making their brands feel safer by destroying the communities that the site relies on...

Unrelated. Kbin and the rest barelly have this kind of content/knowledge that has been accumulating for years

I'm not saying it wont happen in the future, but, deleting or editing you comment history on reddit does more harm that good to us, the users

kinda just making an argument for why its a good idea.

Reddit staff will revert popular comments and posts to the way they were before the Blackout.

This would be an explicit GDPR violation.

Its sorta funny because I was having a back and forth about how I would like blocking to go both ways where I don't see their stuff but they also do not see my stuff. I have gotten many replies saying, hey, you can't change their feed. But folks removing reddit comments technically are changing folks feeds in the same way.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but once you file an EU or California (where Reddit is based) claim, all your comments are deleted regardless of content. Right?

I don't think that's correct. IIRC, it means you have the right to be forgotten--meaning that if you delete your content they can't (legally) restore it. It doesn't mean they'll do the deleting for you; they'll just send you a file of the stuff you have that you can then use to guide the deletion process.

Gotcha, I was thinking they had to go one step beyond and provide the tools required to "make it easy".

My opinion is that if Reddit was really concerned about the preservation of their data, they would keep their API open and encourage 3rd-party interactions with their platform.

I think scrambling your data is not only justified, it's the correct form of protest.