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I have quit all social media except for HN and Reddit. Although on Reddit I just use a burner account for comments and I have a cron job that deletes all my co

I have quit all social media except for HN and Reddit. Although on Reddit I just use a burner account for comments and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any value to the site. Has helped me wean off of just endless scrolling. I only use it about 15 minutes a day now.

devmunchies 5y ago
I found reddit worse than twitter as far as self esteem and group think. Reddit's downvoting is used as punishment for not being "bubbly" (don't know how else to describe the reddit vibe) enough. I do think a feed of programming posts would be nice but I don't want to visit that site.
- m0ngr31 5y ago
  I haven't experienced self esteem issues on Reddit, but the group think problem is one of the biggest issues I have with the platform.
fossuser 5y ago
Yeah - the lack of retention control on these platforms makes me hesitant to use them. For Twitter there are third party sites that make it easy to remove old tweets, but it's nearly impossible to remove likes (you have to start a process with their DPO office and then manually remove them in 3k batches and they have to reload them after each). Reddit is tedious in that you have to do it one by one, there are some scripts to assist (if you edit and clear first it actually removes the comment content they have saved in their DB, but I didn't know this at the time). FB was also extremely tedious - there's a third party plugin that removes things one by one from the UI of the activity log, but the activity log barely works and fails to load often. It took months of rerunning it to clear out the history. I get why a forum like reddit or HN doesn't want to allow deletion since it removes value from the forum, but FB should really make it easier. In theory account deletion removes it, but I'm not sure what that looks like on the backend. You can request the data from FB and see it (including details about what profiles you looked at, images you loaded, etc.). I've reduced down to HN, reddit (a bit), and Twitter without likes. I reject new social apps where I don't have control over my content.
- m0ngr31 5y ago
  Lucky for me I didn't post very much on Twitter so it wasn't too bad to just manually delete them one at a time. I'm using shreddit to edit and then delete my comments on Reddit. It has worked out pretty good for me so far. I deleted my FB account maybe 8 years ago but didn't think to delete my posts first.
tester756 5y ago
>s and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any value to the site. You probably should edit your comments and leave them empty otherwise they're probably still visible - uneddit or something like that
- m0ngr31 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm using shreddit which edits the comment and then deletes it.
digianarchist 5y ago
I use shreddit whitelisting a handful of subreddits that talk about programming (where I think my comments are useful) otherwise I see Reddit as ephemeral. Reddit has started to throttle it's API though and I have a feeling they will eventually prevent comment deletion. What I really want is the ability to disconnect the link between my account and a comment (currently you need to delete the entire account to do this). If I could do that I'd most of them up instead of deleting them.

devmunchies 5y ago

I found reddit worse than twitter as far as self esteem and group think. Reddit's downvoting is used as punishment for not being "bubbly" (don't know how else to describe the reddit vibe) enough. I do think a feed of programming posts would be nice but I don't want to visit that site.

m0ngr31 5y ago
I haven't experienced self esteem issues on Reddit, but the group think problem is one of the biggest issues I have with the platform.

fossuser 5y ago

Yeah - the lack of retention control on these platforms makes me hesitant to use them. For Twitter there are third party sites that make it easy to remove old tweets, but it's nearly impossible to remove likes (you have to start a process with their DPO office and then manually remove them in 3k batches and they have to reload them after each). Reddit is tedious in that you have to do it one by one, there are some scripts to assist (if you edit and clear first it actually removes the comment content they have saved in their DB, but I didn't know this at the time). FB was also extremely tedious - there's a third party plugin that removes things one by one from the UI of the activity log, but the activity log barely works and fails to load often. It took months of rerunning it to clear out the history. I get why a forum like reddit or HN doesn't want to allow deletion since it removes value from the forum, but FB should really make it easier. In theory account deletion removes it, but I'm not sure what that looks like on the backend. You can request the data from FB and see it (including details about what profiles you looked at, images you loaded, etc.). I've reduced down to HN, reddit (a bit), and Twitter without likes. I reject new social apps where I don't have control over my content.

m0ngr31 5y ago
Lucky for me I didn't post very much on Twitter so it wasn't too bad to just manually delete them one at a time. I'm using shreddit to edit and then delete my comments on Reddit. It has worked out pretty good for me so far. I deleted my FB account maybe 8 years ago but didn't think to delete my posts first.

tester756 5y ago

>s and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments/submissions at 5PM every day so I'm not providing any value to the site. You probably should edit your comments and leave them empty otherwise they're probably still visible - uneddit or something like that

m0ngr31 5y ago
Yeah, I'm using shreddit which edits the comment and then deletes it.

digianarchist 5y ago

I use shreddit whitelisting a handful of subreddits that talk about programming (where I think my comments are useful) otherwise I see Reddit as ephemeral. Reddit has started to throttle it's API though and I have a feeling they will eventually prevent comment deletion. What I really want is the ability to disconnect the link between my account and a comment (currently you need to delete the entire account to do this). If I could do that I'd most of them up instead of deleting them.