I logged in to Reddit today
Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
Time to start building all that library of knowledge on the fediverse
Exactly. Waiting for some communities to get formed (I don’t want to run them or be a moderator). Some have started but low activity, especially in the health genre.
I’m really excited for the fediverse. I also knew that patience would prevail on lemmy world as they deal with growth. Today has been amazing to see all the updates they did to improve performance.
Finding all sorts of cool stuff on many instances to subscribe to. I’m actually starting to like this more than Reddit w/Apollo which is crazy to even say.
That's why I saved a backup of my comments before I edited/wiped them all on Reddit.
When I get time I'll go through all 10 years worth of the backup to find information I can share again here.
It’s hard to imagine the library of Alexandria had more info than Reddit
The Library of Alexandria burned down. So can Reddit.
I find it problematic that Reddit thinks it can just sell all the content it’s users created. I like that people are deleting everything, making the site less useful, but it is sad losing all of that knowledge. I hope it reappears in the fediverse.
Imagine if Wikipedia changed its financial model. That would be a major, major problem.
I stripped years of posts off of r/vans when I realized my submissions were almost always the top results on Google images when searching basic keywords (not gaming the search). I've built !vans@lemmy.world here and I've been posting my content from reddit here.
The thought of leaving my content on reddit and driving further traffic to that site just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Imagine my surprise hoping to see some sweet converted rides and got sneaks, lol.
I should buy a pair though.
Haha that would occasionally happen on r/vans. Was always great when someone posted an actual van without checking the sub out first.
I love your approach and hope it becomes the model for others. Anyone that contributes a lot should build a community that is not attached to any of the main for profit social media companies.
never found this community on reddit, but im glad you're here, seems like a fun time. /subscribe
Awesome! Happy to have you!
I was pleasantly surprised to see sneakers instead of vans like the car. I subbed thanks to you. Thank you!
It’s crazy how some of the communications from their CEO has been.
He clearly thinks he owns all the content on the platform and even called the third party app users ‘freeloaders’ when a ton of them were top contributors to the platform.
More users should take all their contributions off. Especially if they are informative big posts. Reddit served as a platform that many people trusted, now it’s gone to a for profit model and blindsided all the people that never signed up for that.
Stupid me thinking that buying awards for excellent content was the only compensation Reddit needed (along with memberships).
Boy was I wrong. I’m hoping Lemmy World will get awards that we can award others to help offset server costs.
I think the current method is better. You can subscribe / donate to main developers working on Lemmy and assist with their server costs. Donation links are accessible on Lemmy's github page.
He also said the mods - the ones who provide all the unpaid labor to moderate everything posted by unpaid content contributors - act like "landed gentry". It's almost like he's trying to piss everyone off.
In a lot of subs it was like that though, to be fair.
Some mods go around collecting subs like cards. I’ve seen certain subs where the mods didn’t really bother protesting, or even did protests that actually drove traffic and platform engagement (r/awww and r/videos) because the thought of being removed from their positions of power was too much to handle.
These kind of mods felt like they ‘owned’ the subreddit in the same way spez thought he ‘owned’ everything. It was not free labour for them, they loved doing it and controlling content streams. If they were asked to pay money to stay as mod, they probably would.
Sorry if this post offends any of the good mods. If you are more likely to say ‘the sub I moderate’ over ‘my sub’ then you are probably one of the good ones, my statements don’t apply, and the whole ‘landed gentry’ thing is incredibly offensive.
Right? Completely disregarding the fact that all content is user generated and moderated by volunteers. I raged when I saw that statement.
I think the mentality at reddit leadership has changed just about 180° since it started. It's not just Steve Huffman, although he is leading it.
Originally they were part of building a community, and users were part of that community.
Now they have become an ordinary business, who believe they are providing a service that should not just be sustainable but monetized as much as possible, and users are no longer a real community, but merely users of a service for profit. No different from Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.
But it's a simple service, not more than a fancy forum, where users provide the content. It's doubtful the service is valuable enough, to allow drawing out much money on advertising before users go elsewhere. And when the users go, so does the content, which can easily turn into a death spiral.
It's basically Usenet with nicer formatting :)
This is what stopped me from doing it. I always feel like if I've helped make one person's day a little bit better, then I've done my bit as a human.
I know how good it is when you have a really complex, niche, problem and someone gives the answer you exactly needed, and I don't want to take that away from the public, even though a company I don't support is profiting off my comments and submissions.
Yeah I feel the same as a big preservationist. I feel that I got value from Reddit before, now I don't anymore but that doesn't take away what I benefitted from previously.
So instead I edited my top 30 comments and added something to the effect of "As of Jul 2023 I'm on lemmy kthxbye".
This is a better solution in my view 👍
When you can’t trust the company not to paywall your contribution or hold it hostage, it’s time to sever ties and do what you can to kill the platform. Every new contribution to Reddit is a further waste of our collective efforts. The sooner the platform dies the sooner contributors move somewhere else where their posts will be in safer hands.
Wikipedia entre database is open for download. It’s under a license which means that anyone may host another Wikipedia clone at any time.
Don’t worry about data from Wikipedia - it should be safe. Totally different beast than Reddit.
Yup, I usually download a snapshot every year or so. It's more because I feel ways about digital archival, but it's super convenient to be able to access that information offline as well.
damn isnt your hard drive full by now? Only downloading the text content or also all the other media like images/video/sound files?
I assume there’s at least someone out there who has a full download of Wikipedia on their computer, ready to go up as soon as the website decides it wants to go to shit.
Don't think it's lost, I think /r/DataHoarders saved a raw copy.
I went and deleted 15 years of reddit comments and posts, editing them before deleting. End of an era for me
10 years of angularjs, angulat, react, and c# answers to problems just disapeared from reddit last week as i wiped all my accounts
As a developer, this hits deep. RIP quality answers & search results for c# (in my case) related quedtions
The thing is - when I gave good answers, I mostly wrote them in Obsidian - so that I have Marktext files with my most interesting answers anyway.
So they haven't gone, they just don't exist inside Reddit any more. Anyone with the same questions could still get them - if there were an equivalent alternative to whatever subreddit exists.
In the case of Linux answers, however, I don't give a toss - because one of the worst things about Reddit is that the best repository of information for any distribution should be the official forum for that distribution... and interestingly, I suffered zero pain using my official forum, whilst Reddit mods seem to enjoy kicking you out for a day or three for telling someone to format queries in a useful way.
Don’t worry, chatGPT and other AIs have already trained off of reddit and probably hold that information
Hopefully Lemmy starts to fill that hole in as more people join and more questions asked then answered.
AI is your friend! I already use a mix of Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT for the really difficult problems. I just do tier 2 support, though.
Yeah, mine was more related to Shopify, eCommerce and health matters. Your stuff was highly technical and took time to share. I still say bravo.
Congrats on becoming the dead mediafire link that fixed the next 5 replies.
Many are waiting for their data takeout requests to complete before doing the same. And to follow up with GDPR requests/GDPR deletion requests.
All to improve their quarter numbers pre-IPO.
I made a post about a niche subject. It is one of the top 3 google results and the only in depth review, outside of YouTube. Deleted it last week. Feelsgood.mpeg
Hey, why not repost it on this site?
We need a /c/ for "ArchivedFromElsewhere" or something. Simple a place for people to dump their conversations they want saved from oblivion and accessible to the public, but not in the hands of spez.
No context needed, just post it there and let it be what it is.
Honestly, lack of interest. If a post fails to gain any discussion, I just move on.
The reason people keep claiming posts are being "restored" by Reddit or "missed" by these tools is that those posts were deleted while many subs were private. Which means the posts/comments were hidden. When the subs came back under restricted/public, then hidden posts/comments became visible again.
On top of that, it's been alleged that Reddit's weird caching limits the display of your posts/comments to a surprisingly low number (I've seen 1000 and 5000). Meaning stuff older than that is simply not locatable other than through third-party search tools. I haven't seen concrete proof of this, though, and I definitely saw 12yo comments being found and deleted when I ran tools on my account. It IS, however, clear that Reddit does not respect data privacy laws that require they delete all posts on a user's request. They demand the user do it themselves while simultaneously not providing tools to do so.
EU's GDPR officers will be very interested in Reddit's documented inability to delete EU Reddit users' personal data.
But is a Reddit users post and comment history personal data? If it was submitted freely and not asked for by Reddit as some kind of sign up or usage rights does it fall under GDPR.
Of course data that can be used to identify an individual comes under GDPR so in that case it’s only the users email address and name. Even the user name doesn’t identify an individual.
I am no fan of Reddit but we need to be careful thinking GDPR gives an individual the right to remove non personal content.
I've seen the explanation that deletion while the sub was private somehow nullified the action. However I've also seen anecdotal mentions of people finding things they deleted long before all this happened reappearing. Just like on a typical hard drive*, Reddit doesn't actually delete, they just mark it as not viewable to appease the user, and they have backups of data that doesn't get removed regardless.
My posts/comments shouldn't have been viewable in my profile if the sub was hidden or private. I didn't post much, thankfully, but the edit-then-delete script I used was hit or miss. When everything came back, many didn't contain the new edited text, but had the old actual post contents.
After my stuff came back the first time I manually edited them all to say [removed] then deleted them.
I had to do it a total of 4 times. It would say it was deleted on my end and my profile page would be empty, then in 1 or 2 days they would be back (most still saying [removed], at least). All the subs had been made public again, so there's no excuse for it.
The last time I did it, I spread it out over a week, occasionally deleting one then leaving it alone for a couple hours. The few that returned in their entirety I would edit with the [removed] text then wait again. They haven't shown back up yet but I'm going to keep checking. We'll see.
I also noticed the up/down ration changed every time I refreshed the page, even if it was just minutes apart. They may be having issues with so many post removals going on.
Anyway.. 4 attempts to delete my posts is 3 too many.
I have subs where I had some posts/comments deleted and others not. (I know because I was the originator of the post, which was deleted, but some of my comments in it were not removed).
I have comments spanning and wide swath of time still floating out there.
Fun times.
I read the admin post about that and I tend to believe them on that issue. I’ve never seen a post I deleted get restored. Just rando posts come back from years ago as subreddits return.
Now I wonder how long until search engines penalize Reddit for this stuff. They still have me ranked #1 to several posts that shows it’s been removed.
There has to be a manual quality penalty coming.
This makes me sad. Information is being erased that will keep people who could've been helped by it from ever finding it.
The people who it will hurt the most have nothing to do with Reddit.
Sad, yes. And I'm willing to admit that it would hurt the people who have nothing to do with Reddit.
But if it keeps those people away from Reddit, see Reddit as not the place to find information, see Reddit as a place that was, full of [deleted] comments, see Reddit as an awful dumpster fire, it is worth it.
It's too easy to see Reddit as the Library of Alexandria, but it isn't. It was a place where people willingly shared information to other people, sure, but it now isn't, and it's more important for people to be made aware of that: It is no longer a place for sharing information.
EDIT: Typos and shit.
I know it sounds like a shitty thing to do but the point is to hurt these people who are looking for help, who will then look for and hopefully contribute to a community elsewhere, which will harm Reddit in the long run. it sucks for people looking for help in the meantime
Yeah, would be nice to have a script that went through old comments and just addended them to say " edit - July 2023: please don't respond to this, I won't see it, I've moved on to Lemmy. Come [ join me] (Lemmy hyperlink)!
Yeah that's why I've decided to leave my account on there. I'm sure some of my posts may be helpful.
I originally left some posts I thought may be useful but I deleted them now. We need to bite the bullet and build that knowledge up again here. If we leave the content behind, people will keep going to reddit as their first stop and keep asking questions there + feeding the ads instead of coming here.
Yea, I'm leaving my account active but just not posting with it anymore. I only use reddit on my desktop now to view the few subreddits that have not moved to a new site/forum yet.
There's too much useful information on reddit going away. I understand the sentiment and the act of protest, but it's still painful to the common man.
Yep. This is the reason I left all my posts and comments up on Reddit. I can get over the fact Reddit is making money off what I posted if I am helping people in the future.
Completely agree, it's like when Youtube removed dislikes, it's not helping people, it just makes things more complicated.
There's one important distinction to be made here:
You're free to leave your own comments over there, no one's forcing you to delete them. Youtube, on the other hand, forced their decision on others, regardless of whether they wanted it or not.
Of the two evils, one being allowing a shitty company profiting off of your work, and the other depriving people of easy answers - The latter is the lesser of the two.
Chat GPT can give you most answers, otherwise make a new thread.
There aren't enough people doing this for it to have an effect. You guys don't seem to see the broader picture. This is nothing.
By that logic, there is no point in voting.
I get it. But I also hate how useless the internet has now become for me. Kept trying to do research on a topic the other day and kept ending up at private subreddits or reddit comments with nothing but deleted comments. It will take years (if ever) for that kind of knowledge to grow again. I'm just completely at the mercy of random SEO crap reviews or gut instinct now when I need to research stuff to buy.
Who were you denvercoder9? What did you see?!
I do understand. The problem is, I’m hearing that Reddit is testing the idea of forcing people to log in. At that point, SEO becomes worthless as the spiders can’t crawl the data to even suggest it to you in the first place.
The fact of the matter is, Reddit is bloated in staff and expenses. They are already monetizing everyone’s content with awards and ads from users using their site and app. Now they are double-dipping with the API used by many to submit content.
They chose to bite the hands that feed them so many of us decided to stop serving them food, including the leftovers.
Hopefully Elon's little tantrum over the weekend has scared them enough not to do it. But I doubt it has
The reality is that as long as we're making centralized platforms driven purely by profit the center of knowledge we're going to keep burning the Library Of Alexandria.
Even if everyone wasn't removing their comments and making subs private, that content only continues to exist online for as long as it provides reddit some form of value. The value it provides you and others is only significant in so far as it serves reddits immediate profit motives. The moment they determine they can't meet their revenue goals they will shut it all down.
The only solution if we want to stop repeating this cycle is to go back to more sustainable models of distributed content, rather than the VC backed blitzscaling and hyper centralization that we know as social media today.
Lemmy (hopefully) fits the bill for this type of solution. Though it still sucks that we have to burn Alexandria again to depart in that direction
I guess my question is how does Lemmy solve this problem in particular? Maybe I don't understand it fully, but is there anything stopping an instance from shutting down and losing all the content associated with that instance? Users still have the ability to delete their posts and comments, don't they? I do think there are many benefits to the decentralized system, but in these specific ways I'm not seeing a tangible benefit.
Have you tried excluding reddit from your search results? Don't forget reddit is nothing but a regurgitation of the internet. The info you want is still out there.
Reddit is a collection of people's thoughts and opinions. So no, I'm not sure that information is elsewhere. Where for example can I find a community like buy it for life? Or the home automation community? What Google served to me instead were corporate ads, not real user experience and opinions on products
I have 650k comment karma on my profile. Time to delete my comments that were so helpful.
My plan is to delete all my content, but leave my profile intact, so posterity can see what a prolific contributor I was, but not see any of my content.
Will Google searches eventually link to lemmy? I don't really know how this site works, but I would assume that could grow the site more than anything else would.
My Google search today linked to a technology@lemmy.ml post so it's happening
That’s absolutely awesome!
Now you just have to start weaning yourself off Google - it's more evil than Reddit.
i really doubt it. there is not much impact on reddit and the protest showed that, before 3p apps shut down.
That's an interesting perspective, but I'm not really asking about Reddit. I'm wondering about how Lemmy can grow on its own
My opinion is that, rather than thinking it can instantly aggregate the web, it would be the best solution for anyone wanting to get a group of people with common interests together in a relatively safe place.
thats true, i kind of taken your comment out of context. i just assume thats the general conversation.
For you as a personal user, the protest might have been an inconvenience at most, but I don't know about the impact it had on potential investors. Think about it this way: would you invest in a new IPO when their users, who provide all of the content and moderation, are willing to subvert the whole premise of the company? I surely fucking wouldn't.
willing to but couldn't do it?
I just deleted my 8 years Reddit account yesterday. With the help of some lines of code, still took me roughly an hour to wipe out all my posts and comments all these years. It does feel bittersweet but I don't feel the need to leave behind all my tracks on Reddit. After all they don't get to have that. This is what I used to delete my data on Reddit, if someone needs that here's the link: https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-delete-all-reddit-comments-posts/
It hurts my soul knowing all of this useful content was removed from reddit.
I've moved on to Lemmy, but I'm having a hard time removing everything from reddit. I know with so many people removing their old posts/replies that it will definitely hurt reddit, so many googled content won't be there.
It would be cool if we could transfer our old posts here in some sort of meaningful way, but I don't see how that could happen in a way that makes sense.
Libreddit.hu has been super helpful. No user log in; can subscribe to subreddits via cookies and it doesn’t give Reddit any traffic. I use it to browse some subs like Credibledefense
I think for now, you can export your content. Perhaps in the future someone will create a tool to reimport those on lemmy.
I was active on several subs with a known username and had some high karma r/askhistorians posts. No ragrets.
For sure, if anyone sees a 'ragret' it would be deleted immediately ;)
Haha, I once had a post removed for being too scientific. :( I was explaining a climate shift that would have caused people to wear different things at the time.
I tried to deleted mine as well.
Then I searched my username via Google and found a ton of comments that were not deleted.
Yep. I'm just periodically running a delete script and getting a few at a time at this point.
is it possible to locally backup all my comments and posts? I just want to save some important stuff throughout the years before overwriting all of it.
Power Delete Suite has an option to save all content it deletes in a CSV before it does any deletions.
If you GDPR request your data from Reddit you can use the following tool to access your user profile
https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite
I've seen a couple people complain that reddit is ignoring it, and even restoring their deleted posts.
Gotta keep up appearances so people cant see the steaming pile of shit is rotting away, i guess.
It definitely seems quieter and the posts that are there not the same quality - that's just from a look through r/all. Not sure if that is accurate or not, but just the feeling I got.
Just overwrote everything in the old account; will set the system to delete everything tonight and then a 10-year-old account is done. I will keep the account for a while longer, should they decide to restore anything I’ve deleted.
Deleted my 13 years of comments and posts recently. Just gonna leave this here for folks... https://www.playerup.com/accounts/redditaccount/
Edit:
In case anyone mistakes that link for how I deleted my comments: I used power delete suite.
I didn't know you could sell your Reddit account. I deleted posts and comments on my 4 year old account with over 14k karma.
Wow! Wow... Oh, I could get enough for a new game.
Nothing insane, but I had a 8 year account with 150k karma that I earned through informative posts, endearing pictures of my pug, and a few shitposts here and there. Banned for zero reason (yes i know, but seriously) by a mod that had an "in" with a Reddit admin, i'm sure of it.
Anyways, just went and deleted it, after it being a very, very constant in my life. Its been quite the cathartic experience, and somewhat freeing even. Mobile and reddit are a dangerous combination for the thinkers out there.
Actually, this is one of the biggest issues with Reddit - assuming Karma has value and getting narcissistic feedback.
I got more than that replying to DadJokes with a quickly googled PUN once per day.
Yeah, Reddit loves upvoting their Puns. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get an inflated sense of self from the karma, but it was important to me as someone who mostly posted content and not comments.
Enjoying lemmy a lot right now though, including the new client I found for mobile.
I have noticed more and more [deleted] messages in older threads lately. I was trying to do some Rimworld modding, and the threads relevant to my questions were 1-5 years old, ~20 upvotes, and 2-3 positively voted top level comments. Almost all of them had a [deleted] comment.
Legend
I deleted my reddit account yesterday. I figured what's a better way to celebrate Independence Day by deleting my reddit account while watching fireworks and drinking a beer.
Of course, I used power delete to remove my comments before deleting my account.
I would recommend still sending a GDPR delete request if you are in EU just to be sure, since there may be stuff left behind in private communities, backups etc. It also forces reddit and their partners to delete data they use for advertising.
Little bonus, it is annoying for reddit to process GDPR requests.
I sent a GDPS request for my information in order to have an archive of my posts to look through and enjoy, perhaps remix and repost on here if possible. Apparently I submitted it while people were attempting to overwhelm reddit by mass requesting them, so idk if it will be approved
There's no will in there. They must give you your data or else. The only thing they can do is to notify you of a required extension because they are overwhelmed. Sans that, they are obliged by law to give you what's yours.
In the UK, requests can sometimes be denied
Something something actions and consequences.
When did you submit your request? I sent mine on the 22nd and they still haven't replied. I'm thinking of reporting them to my country's privacy authority if they don't comply before 22/07.
Another hero is among us!
I used redact to rewrite all of my comments since there have been reports of reddit restoring deleted posts
Yup. They refused to pay me for my comments and posts so I overwrote and deleted them all before deleting my account.
Yep! Sync and (for the first few years) BaconReader brought me to Reddit. Not Reddit. I have several high karma accounts that are a decade plus. Nuked all of my comments and posts today, and now they're up for sale!
Post the knowledge here! I’m learning SEO rn, totally selfish reasons why I’m asking 😂
I deleted all comments from my 2 latest Reddit accounts, 5 digits karma. If I ever revisit Reddit it's though as blocked browser without an account.
I just did the same thing. I deleted all my posts and comments on my 14k karma account. I'll be keeping the account though, just for the memories.
Thanks for the heads up, this is like the 10th time ive had to run power delete.
I don't know if it's still possible to do now that Steve Huffingman has shat on its API, but I've got an automated process (via Shreddit).
I actually intended stop it at July 1. I never did. I'm now looking forward to the day Reddit sends me a love letter forcing me to stop, or else, send assassins my way (or sue me, whatever).
I'm still waiting for them to send me my data before I erase. There's just no way I can manually go through 10+ years to see if there's any info I want to keep copies of. But now I'm wondering what happens if they never respond to my data request. Before rif went dark I saw a lot of others saying they never got a response.
I did not get a response yet. They still have 3 weeks before it is a GDPR breach. I am on a vacation but when I get home, I will resend my requests via email to have proof and forward to EU regulators if they miss the deadline.
I don't have a response either yet... Might get interesting!
I got mine today! A few irl friends that use reddit also just received theirs. Might be worth checking!
test
Did the same, but it feels wrong. Months/Years later someone build a transition for bring all your reddit stuff to Lemmy. But it's already lost.
I wanted to look up how to delete all the content I posted on reddit over the years. I do not find it. When I google "how do I delete all my reddit posts" I mostly get AI generated no name sites, ad-infested "Wiki-How" ... and reddit posts, which are most likely the most helpfull .... does not look like there is a "delete" button I can click, have to install scripts or something ... Fuck.
Isn't it a bit egotistical to watch how Google rates your Reddit comments? Maybe you deserve to get them deleted if you treat them as a means of domination rather than information.
I deleted them. And no, it’s an observation after trying to figure out why I was getting DMs from 3 year old and older posts. That’s why I know they were ranking and getting traffic.
Thank God I didn't give in to herd instinct and delete my Reddit account. I did that four times in a row, and I don't play those games anymore. I didn't sign up for a subject that is foreign to me, especially since in my opinion the alternative apps work worse than the official one, and the lack of video downloads doesn't bother me because I don't watch porn. My Reddit stays the way it was. The FreeBSD and Slackware communities and a couple or three others have sane members.
Why would FreeBSD and Slackware communities be on a proprietary platform, when an open source platform is available?
Reddit was easy and having run Slackware, anywhere you can save time so you can make more tweaks is just the name of the game.
I remember the "we are adults, not revolutionaries" entry in r/freebsd. After that, the subreddit administration decided to leave things as they were.
I don't understand the point raised by R. Stallman about using only free software. Because for most of us the PC is a working tool, but in no way a religious toy.