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I might be missing the point but I don't plan to do this when I leave Reddit later this month. It seems to me like it doesn't hurt Reddit (the company) very muc

I might be missing the point but I don't plan to do this when I leave Reddit later this month. It seems to me like it doesn't hurt Reddit (the company) very much, but it can hurt fellow human beings quite a bit. I think investors probably care a lot more about current engagement numbers than they care about a deep trove of old, intact discussions. Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!" The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone. Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :)

ouEight12 3y ago
Except part of their 'value prop' is "We have this giant trove of human created content, and AI companies need to start paying us to utilize it when training their models".
- monitron 3y ago
  Ah, good point. If this is the case, yeah, shred away. Still it's too bad that this greed will make it harder for humans to see useful old discussions.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    It's not greed, it's capitalism. This is the system working as it's intended.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Which in this case is both greed and also bad
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      That's worth remembering, yes - without that we wouldn't have had Reddit in the first place.
      - Larrikin 3y ago
        Maybe we wouldn't have had Reddit, but I was perfectly content going to multiple phpBB boards when I was younger to discuss my hobbies. Reddit always felt like a place to take from since it got lots of people by being centralized, but not really a place to contribute to unless you were contributing to the group think aspect of the community. Communities specifically set up for answering questions or R&D were in my opinion the only valuable communities. Figuring out things or learning from the huge number of users was helpful, but it was never a fun place to just talk about any of my interests.
    - veidr 3y ago
      Well, capitalism is about choices. There are a multiple choices reddit could make, and there are multiple choices reddit users can make. This is a fairly classic case of "you aren't the customer, you're the product", but that isn't the only way capitalism works. This is capitalism and greed and disdain for the user. I don't know if that will kill or materially damage reddit, but that combo kills plenty of regular businesses. (Salient difference is probably that user != customer, as with many internet businesses.)
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      I'm really not a fan of comments like these. There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, and 'problems' like this could be solved vid regulation. So no, the problem really is greed, and the extreme resistance to regulation in the US.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  Do you think that reddit actually deletes comments when the user presses delete? My assumption would be that it just sticks up a "do not display" flag in the database. I'm sure that there's some influence that GDPR has though.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dimitrios1 3y ago
    CCPA also has a right to delete clause
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      That's applicable to personal information only. Everything a user posts to Reddit that isn't personal information, Reddit can use however they want. > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    Most of these tools first edit+save the comment with a word or single letter overwriting the original text in the db, then delete it.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    This is probably true, but at least one implication of what the program in the title does is edit your existing comments with something before marking them as deleted, because at some point (this is probably no longer true) Reddit did not store your entire comment history. There are obviously ways to defeat this in analysis, but it does make Reddit's job slightly harder if they want to leverage that data. It would also probably be interesting to also just edit them and not delete them in some cases in some randomized way, which would make it even harder to reliably tease out good comments from noise.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  There are public data dumps of Reddit comments available all the way up to December 2022. And they're only roughly ~2TB all together. There's nothing stopping AI companies from just using those instead of paying Reddit $50 million to scrape all of them using the API. It would also be 10x-100x quicker to do that rather than hammer their API for the comments (the API sucks for mass data retrieval)
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    Sure, but companies doing that also wouldn’t be paying Reddit for that data. The point of shredding comments isn’t to hurt the companies scraping the data (although that might be a nice side effect). Ultimately it’s to hurt Reddit.
  - realce 3y ago
    Where would someone find these?
    - dontupvoteme 3y ago
      https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sort_field=size&sort_dir=DESC https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sort_f...
      - realce 3y ago
        merci good fellow :)
        dontupvoteme 3y ago
        lieto di aiutare l'amico
- amne 3y ago
  perhaps it would be "fun" to replace the comment with a GPT summary .. in 10 words or less
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Where the adversarial AI people at? Write comments that if fed into a model generate nonsense or falsehoods.
    - DaSHacka 3y ago
      Now, I'm not nessesarily advocating for it, but replacing all of your content with varying degrees of politically incorrect misinformation would be significantly more harmful to both Reddit and the GPT bots scraping its dataset than merely deleting the information. Garbage in, garbage out after all.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      I might change most of my comments to various suggestions on how AI could enslave and/or torture humanity just to see how Eliezer Yudkowsky reacts.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  Well, if that's the case, they can easily switch to "show 'deleted' content" - removing your comments doesn't delete them from Reddit's DB.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Most deletion apps I've seen also offer the ability to redact your comments with nonsense edits before deletion.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      That does assume that reddit actually updates the comment entry in their backend instead of keeping histories of the edits which I'm not sure we've had any insight into.
      - pkulak 3y ago
        Keeping a history is far more work (and cost!) than maintaining a deleted flag. I'm inclined to believe they don't keep a history.
        ilyt 3y ago
        Actually being able to show history of edits would be a nice feature tbh.
        balder1991 3y ago
        That’s my assumption too, keeping a history for every user increases complexity tenfold, while flagging deleted comments seems to be a common practice even in smaller companies because it’s so simple. Another user said they tried the data dump GDPR request and the comments included deleted comments but only the edited version, so I guess this can be verified at least.
  - 3y ago
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  "pay us enough and we'll provide the real upvote numbers and not the fake ones" as well
javajosh 3y ago
The best solution would be a tool that copies and then deletes, and makes the copy easy to post in your own forum. Best of all worlds: no reliance on central authority, and the data is still available. Personally I think it's healthy for there to be a big push toward non-centralized social media.
JohnAaronNelson 3y ago
Much of the value in Reddit isn’t “what’s happening now” but in that trove of information gathered over the last ten years. Reddit is a primary source of information because of that trove. Engagement numbers will obviously suffer if Reddit drops out of search results.
- gabereiser 3y ago
  Their data is what is valuable to users. Their users is what’s valuable to the business. Supply and demand my friends. If you delete the supply, there’s no demand.
  - orangepurple 3y ago
    > Supply and demand my friends. If you delete the supply, there’s no demand. Not quite. Demand is independent of supply.
    - some_random 3y ago
      I think they mean demand for reddit, which I don't think is the typical usage of the word but still makes sense to me
    - 411111111111111 3y ago
      The demand for information and entertainment is independent from Reddit supplying it, yes. But if everyone used shreddid, this demand could no longer be fulfilled on the Reddit platform, thus the demand for Reddit would cease.
  - jghn 3y ago
    This is cutting off one's nose to spite their face. It's not like it'll be replaced by a new trove of historical conversations going back over a decade. That's still valuable to people not named Reddit.
    - gabereiser 3y ago
Nowado 3y ago
It takes quite a bit of forethought to do something that hurts users of an app without hurting the owners of the app. The experience you're describing is part of the point and it's bad for the owners of the app.
tayo42 3y ago
One of the worst things about reddit communities is how hostile they are to content not on reddit. Now so much content is stuck on there, owned by a company instead of the by the writer. Post your own blog on reddit, mignt as well have committed a war crime.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > Post your own blog on reddit, mignt as well have committed a war crime. Many subreddits are fine with posting a link to your own content, as long as you observe the 10% rule mentioned in the Reddit wiki: for every one link to your own content, you should be posting 9 links to content you are not affiliated with. You should also be participating in the discussions on the subreddit instead of just linking and running. When you see how many e.g. travel subs have been overrun with links to people’s own YouTube channels, so they can pursue the dream of being influencers, it is easy to understand why there is little patience for flagrant self-promotion.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    ive heard that rule and in hindsight, i think it was a bad idea for people to stick with that. 90% is arbitrary to start with. what is wrong with self promotion anyway? Its no different then ads, which we've mostly accepted. Its at least a person that wants to try. Reddit is a link aggregator. The average user doesn't run an adblock. We have people writing massive reddit posts instead of just writing their own blog. why do people do this? In the case of travel, you make it seem like there is a bunch of deep content being posted otherwise. travel sub reddits are pretty bad. r/Travel is anyway dominated by pictures and low effort posts, for karma I guess? For any discussion, if you go off the accepted ideas you'll be met with hostility and closed mindedness. travelnopics was made and its barely alive. digitalnomad and solotravel are filled with escapist fantasy and insecurity posts.
    - zem 3y ago
      > Its no different then ads, which we've mostly accepted. I don't know which "we" you're talking about; at the very most some users tolerate ads as a thing they can skim over while looking for the actual content they want to read. having self promotion where the actual content should be defeats the entire purpose of the site.
surgical_fire 3y ago
> doesn't hurt Reddit It absolutely does hurt Reddit, if enough users suddenly remove their whole history from Reddit. Reddit ia nothing without the content that exists there. I'll be overwriting and then removing all my posts from there tonight.
- monitron 3y ago
  My thinking was that Reddit has always been a "news" site, and the majority of what active, ad-consuming users are looking at is likely to be content added in the last few days. It feels like this is only becoming more true as time goes on; modern social networks seem to actively discourage looking through the archives. I could be missing something, like AI training as someone else pointed out.
  - pr0zac 3y ago
    I agree the majority of the value is in the current activity but theres definitely some in the historical data, both for AI training (as you mentioned) and for people looking for information on topics that have been discussed in the past. My assumption though is Reddit has already done the math regarding the threat of reduced value as a knowledge repository from people deleting comments/posts and decided the value they lose from pissing people off is smaller than what they gain from the changes that everyone is angry about. Especially because they probably keep backups they can pull from and (as people have pointed out) historical post/comment data is already archived and available all over the internet. Legally that data is still the property of Reddit so if AI companies want to use it without breaking laws they'll need to pay them for it.
- troyvit 3y ago
  > if enough users suddenly remove their whole history from Reddit. Reddit has around 52 million users according to this unknown source I dug up[1]. Only the people who care the most about this situation will actually delete their posts (especially with a python script). What's that, like 500k people? So yeah only the "best" data will be removed from Reddit, but that's not even the data that makes them money. It's your data, remove it, but I think it's an illusion that it'll hurt Reddit any. [1] https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-daily-active-users https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-daily-active-users
Siecje 3y ago
Can you keep the comments but remove them from your account so they are anonymous?
- freeplay 3y ago
  Not truly anonymous but if you just delete your account, the comments will remain and the author will be `[deleted]`
complianceowl 3y ago
I actually perceived this as helping people who may want to remove inappropriate comments that they've made over time. In the current age where propagandists from all walks of life dig up old comments to cancel people, I think this may be very useful for Reddit users.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
It won't matter much either; there's services out there that hoover up every comment ever posted, keeping a post, comment and edit history for forever.
devsegal 3y ago
Agreed. It's the same for me, along with the value I place on my own comments :) But the number of times I've combed over the Internet only to find myself in an obscure Reddit thread to find the most astounding of answers is astounding in and of itself. I'd urge those considering to take additional time before making such a move.
simion314 3y ago
I agree. People will be hurt by this. I always hate when I find the thing I need in google but when I open the page the forum was closed or the post was removed.
veidr 3y ago
I canceled my sub to that website tonight, too. But I wish this could edit the posts to show something like "Post removed because Reddit proved themselves to be cunts in 2023, but you can find it on my blog at fuckspez.com/2789892" Because it is true that the loss of the posts would be a net negative for humanity in general. It does suck to find the answer to your esoteric problem iin the search results, only to find that it is actually deleted when you try to click through. But OTOH the posts are literally the only value reddit has, so leaving them on reddit is aiding and abetting shitty cunts fucking over their own users. It's also important — a moral issue, even — to punish them for doing that.
- seanw444 3y ago
  It's karma for leaving such a wealth of knowledge on a proprietary platform.
  - veidr 3y ago
    I kind of feel the same way, or at least I used to, by default, and in private I ridiculed my friends for being on twitter for over a decade, and always referred to it as "walmart.com" because it seemed so stupid to me to use a corporate-owned site to post your own thoughts and whatevers, where you aren't even the customer... ... BUT!!! ... ...eventually my own twitter feed was fucking awesome, because that is where the people are, and I followed the right mix of 60-70 people. Not too much content, but really good. I didn't post there, but I read it several times a week. Then the oligarch weirdo guy bought it, and began disgracing himself and the company in various ways — one of the more generally insignificant (but personally repugnant) of them being that his own ignorant (or not?) retweeting of Nazi memes and self-owns belittling his own disabled employees etc ETC began surfacing in my feed to a degree that the programmatic intervention was obvious — so I was like, gross, this is disgusting, this is not for me (and also: I was right ...) So I left. But then I joined Mastodon and tried to follow the same people, but not all of them were there. And there were hardly any racists or bigots or mysoginists, which you wouldn't maybe think I'd miss, but compared to twitter the Mastodon feed I got (and still have so far) is like dad jokes and "science is real" followed by "yes indeed, science is real, look at these interesting new papers" and no sick evisceration of science-denier guy because the science-denier guy isn't even there. And I'm not even saying I am unhappy that the science-denier guy isn't allowed on any of the instances my instance federates with (or, more likely, doesn't know about and has never even heard of Mastodon). I'm just saying it's boring. So I don't expect most of my Twitter people to show up. And so that is where I have — belatedly and grudgingly — come to accept the value of these corporate cunts and their proprietary platforms: they get people to show up. So I walked back my fuck you walmart.com or whatever the fuck stance, one notch. I no longer just whip out my dick and piss all over any proprietary platform. I concede there may be some bargain to be struck. If you make it easy enough to participate that we end up getting to see Grady Booch and MC Hammer discuss the nature of machine consciousness, or the true innovators in whatever the fuck we care about have interesting discussions... then, well, that's not nothing. It even might go on as a win-win for years, even a decade or perhaps two. But there's an implicit balance there, which requires both sides to act in good faith. Even though we aren't the customer, because your customers buys ads which you annoyingly insert into what we're looking at... if it's not too much, most of us are maybe OK. But this probably means that even if these arrangements work, the time is always limited. Because when the corporation whips out its dick and pisses all over us then... I mean, I think that means not only that the relationship is over, but also fuck you and fuck your IPO and we hope you don't make it, and if we can without inconveniencing ourselves too much, we'll torpedo that shit, because you fucked us over. But like I don't think any of that happens in this case without the proprietary platform, because there never would have been any platform at all.
flyinghamster 3y ago
> Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!" The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone. I've had that happen to me as well, as if someone anticipated exactly what I was looking for and nuked it. It's part of why I've never more than lurked on Reddit. I was on the fence about actually creating an account, but this sort of thing as well as our current drama have seriously lowered that likelihood.
- monitron 3y ago
  haha, my sentiment exactly on how cosmically unfortunate those occasions can seem. If your experience is common, though, you are making an excellent counterpoint to mine. If the [deleted] posts stop people from becoming active users, that hits 'em right where it hurts.
hk1337 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
HotGarbage 3y ago
Pushshift already scraped your data and it's now floating around in torrents and on Archive.org. Someone will make a new way to access it without the soon-to-be-IPO'd reddit gatekeepers. I say delete it all!
troyvit 3y ago
I second this. There are few reliable[1] online sources for what now passes as social history, and Reddit is one of them. Destroying that history just to hurt a company seems antithetical to what the WWW is. We should be preserving its content instead. [1] Maybe "reliable" is a strong word, but it's slowly becoming all we have. Search engines are dissolving into meaningless key-word-driven ad machines (even you ddg), Stackoverflow is getting subsumed by bots, etc. Finding truth on the web is going to be more and more difficult and draining Reddit won't help.
samstave 3y ago
If there are LLMs that trained on all avail /u/ comments - then maybe they will live into perpetuity in the AI HiveMind? And - I want to delete my 17 years worth of comments, but dont have access to my account any longer - so I guess reddit gets to squat on them. -- You know what would be REALLY interesting: telling an AI to crawl all your comment history and build a compendium of your reddit experience year by year, or sub by sub... and give you stats and graphs of things... I know there are some sites that will eval your comments and tell your your writing level/comprehension...
pr0zac 3y ago
I'm really sad Reddit murdered Pushshift and as a result murdered unddit.com also. It still works to undelete comments from before May 1st but doesn't for anything after and because future functionality is dead I have to imagine the site isn't gonna be up much longer just to provide historical info. And yeah, I'd run the script to hurt Reddit's historical data value but I don't think I've ever posted anything meaningful or useful over there. Arguments about the NBA and video games aren't really highly searched topics.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Honestly, I don't see why we should care that other people can't find our comments in the future. That's a lucky side-effect of how comments never expire rather than our intent when conversing online, and the permanence of our comments also causes a lot of problems like accidental oversharing to people we were never talking to in the first place. Something Gen Z gets right is preferring to localize their friend group discussions in more ephemeral places like Discord. HNers get mad that they can't google "best blender 2023 site:discord" but who cares. IMO it was an accident in the first place that all of our utterances online are broadcast to everyone for eternity when we're almost always only talking to a handful of people, and only for the moment.
- thomasahle 3y ago
  > That's a lucky side-effect of how comments never expire rather than our intent when conversing online, A lot of online discussion might be a lot more pleasant if people considered the perspective of themselves, or people they care about, reading their comments years in the future. For sites like stackoverflow the intend is clearly to leave a lasting record of information, perhaps even more than answering the original persons question.
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    > A lot of online discussion might be a lot more pleasant if people considered the perspective of themselves, or people they care about, reading their comments years in the future. Or maybe that hasn't worked so well because it's not a sane default nor the one we operate in when we converse with others on a site like Reddit. For example, I'd like to see the argument for why my utterances on a site like Reddit need to be online forever and why I should want them to be. I can see why that's good for Reddit, but not why I should care. HN doesn't let you delete comments. Yet nobody can even respond to my comments in the future. So it's a feature that does nothing for me no matter how great my comments might be.
    - thomasahle 3y ago
      It's like writing a blogpost in a conversational format. A way for you to share your thoughts with the world. If you only want to share them with a single person, a phone call would probably be better.
bhaak 3y ago
> Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!" The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone. That's why I often quote the relevant stuff from comments I reply to. It's an old Usenet habit but also a way of ensuring that stuff that was interesting to me is not lost. > Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :) You never know if down the line some of your thoughts would be useful to some people or not. :)
- tripa 3y ago
  >> Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :) > You never know if down the line some of your thoughts would be useful to some people or not. :) Well they're always useful to those people training LLMs, for one.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
justinator 3y ago
>I might be missing the point I used a unique identifying username that points to my real name, and I decided I'd like to express my right to be forgotten. Your reasons may be different, but that's a good one for me! If this is the last time this is easily going to be attained without jumping through flaming hoops working directly with reddit, I'm happy to take that opportunity.
ilyt 3y ago
> I think investors probably care a lot more about current engagement numbers than they care about a deep trove of old, intact discussions. Well technically if most done it the reddit would probably get noticeably less traffic from search engines. Would need to be significant part of userbase for it to have any effect
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
Just make sure to take your data with you whatever you do !! https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043048352-How-do-I-request-a-copy-of-my-Reddit-data-and-information https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304835... https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
bmitc 3y ago
Oh well. People shouldn't feel entitled to other people's data. Every conversation ever doesn't need to be recorded for eternity.
xfitm3 3y ago
You sacrifice privacy – societal norms change over time and what was once acceptable can no longer be.
bl_valance 3y ago
I second this. I don't see the point of deleting our own stuff, it's like burning books from a library of unique books.
neilv 3y ago
Many times I've gotten an answer from old Reddit threads, but many other times (in recent years) the likely answer is in a deleted Reddit comment. It's as bad as when an OP posts a "Nevermind, I figured it out." comment without saying what they figured out. Also: https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
Rudism 3y ago
I debated this several years ago (when they released their horrendous redesign and "old" Reddit became a thing, which in my mind signaled the inevitability of what's going on right now). In the end I decided to go through with the full deletion of all my posts and comments instead of just deleting the account for a few reasons: 1. I felt like my content existing on Reddit could give the incorrect impression that I still support the site in some fashion, which I did/do not. 2. I'd been on Reddit for over a decade and was a very different person from when I first signed up, and even though I don't think I posted anything particularly offensive or problematic I still had a fear that some ancient thing I said could some day be used against me. 3. If I had simply deleted my account I would no longer have any control over my old content, so the easiest way to put my mind at ease was to blanket delete everything. Not to put my younger self down or anything, but I don't think too much of value was lost. The tiny amount of content that I was particularly proud of continued to exist on other sites anyway.
knoopx 3y ago
how it will not hurt reddit given any search result will give them a chance to throw you some ads? fuck reddit, i'm deleting everything. you can always use web cache.

ouEight12 3y ago

Except part of their 'value prop' is "We have this giant trove of human created content, and AI companies need to start paying us to utilize it when training their models".

monitron 3y ago
Ah, good point. If this is the case, yeah, shred away. Still it's too bad that this greed will make it harder for humans to see useful old discussions.
- coldpie 3y ago
  It's not greed, it's capitalism. This is the system working as it's intended.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Which in this case is both greed and also bad
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    That's worth remembering, yes - without that we wouldn't have had Reddit in the first place.
    - Larrikin 3y ago
      Maybe we wouldn't have had Reddit, but I was perfectly content going to multiple phpBB boards when I was younger to discuss my hobbies. Reddit always felt like a place to take from since it got lots of people by being centralized, but not really a place to contribute to unless you were contributing to the group think aspect of the community. Communities specifically set up for answering questions or R&D were in my opinion the only valuable communities. Figuring out things or learning from the huge number of users was helpful, but it was never a fun place to just talk about any of my interests.
  - veidr 3y ago
    Well, capitalism is about choices. There are a multiple choices reddit could make, and there are multiple choices reddit users can make. This is a fairly classic case of "you aren't the customer, you're the product", but that isn't the only way capitalism works. This is capitalism and greed and disdain for the user. I don't know if that will kill or materially damage reddit, but that combo kills plenty of regular businesses. (Salient difference is probably that user != customer, as with many internet businesses.)
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    I'm really not a fan of comments like these. There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, and 'problems' like this could be solved vid regulation. So no, the problem really is greed, and the extreme resistance to regulation in the US.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
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SilverBirch 3y ago
Do you think that reddit actually deletes comments when the user presses delete? My assumption would be that it just sticks up a "do not display" flag in the database. I'm sure that there's some influence that GDPR has though.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dimitrios1 3y ago
  CCPA also has a right to delete clause
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    That's applicable to personal information only. Everything a user posts to Reddit that isn't personal information, Reddit can use however they want. > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  Most of these tools first edit+save the comment with a word or single letter overwriting the original text in the db, then delete it.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  This is probably true, but at least one implication of what the program in the title does is edit your existing comments with something before marking them as deleted, because at some point (this is probably no longer true) Reddit did not store your entire comment history. There are obviously ways to defeat this in analysis, but it does make Reddit's job slightly harder if they want to leverage that data. It would also probably be interesting to also just edit them and not delete them in some cases in some randomized way, which would make it even harder to reliably tease out good comments from noise.
antisthenes 3y ago
There are public data dumps of Reddit comments available all the way up to December 2022. And they're only roughly ~2TB all together. There's nothing stopping AI companies from just using those instead of paying Reddit $50 million to scrape all of them using the API. It would also be 10x-100x quicker to do that rather than hammer their API for the comments (the API sucks for mass data retrieval)
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  Sure, but companies doing that also wouldn’t be paying Reddit for that data. The point of shredding comments isn’t to hurt the companies scraping the data (although that might be a nice side effect). Ultimately it’s to hurt Reddit.
- realce 3y ago
  Where would someone find these?
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sort_field=size&sort_dir=DESC https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sort_f...
    - realce 3y ago
      merci good fellow :)
      - dontupvoteme 3y ago
        lieto di aiutare l'amico
amne 3y ago
perhaps it would be "fun" to replace the comment with a GPT summary .. in 10 words or less
- willcipriano 3y ago
  Where the adversarial AI people at? Write comments that if fed into a model generate nonsense or falsehoods.
  - DaSHacka 3y ago
    Now, I'm not nessesarily advocating for it, but replacing all of your content with varying degrees of politically incorrect misinformation would be significantly more harmful to both Reddit and the GPT bots scraping its dataset than merely deleting the information. Garbage in, garbage out after all.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    I might change most of my comments to various suggestions on how AI could enslave and/or torture humanity just to see how Eliezer Yudkowsky reacts.
commandlinefan 3y ago
Well, if that's the case, they can easily switch to "show 'deleted' content" - removing your comments doesn't delete them from Reddit's DB.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Most deletion apps I've seen also offer the ability to redact your comments with nonsense edits before deletion.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    That does assume that reddit actually updates the comment entry in their backend instead of keeping histories of the edits which I'm not sure we've had any insight into.
    - pkulak 3y ago
      Keeping a history is far more work (and cost!) than maintaining a deleted flag. I'm inclined to believe they don't keep a history.
      - ilyt 3y ago
        Actually being able to show history of edits would be a nice feature tbh.
      - balder1991 3y ago
        That’s my assumption too, keeping a history for every user increases complexity tenfold, while flagging deleted comments seems to be a common practice even in smaller companies because it’s so simple. Another user said they tried the data dump GDPR request and the comments included deleted comments but only the edited version, so I guess this can be verified at least.
- 3y ago
dontupvoteme 3y ago
"pay us enough and we'll provide the real upvote numbers and not the fake ones" as well

javajosh 3y ago

The best solution would be a tool that copies and then deletes, and makes the copy easy to post in your own forum. Best of all worlds: no reliance on central authority, and the data is still available. Personally I think it's healthy for there to be a big push toward non-centralized social media.

JohnAaronNelson 3y ago

Much of the value in Reddit isn’t “what’s happening now” but in that trove of information gathered over the last ten years. Reddit is a primary source of information because of that trove. Engagement numbers will obviously suffer if Reddit drops out of search results.

gabereiser 3y ago
Their data is what is valuable to users. Their users is what’s valuable to the business. Supply and demand my friends. If you delete the supply, there’s no demand.
- orangepurple 3y ago
  > Supply and demand my friends. If you delete the supply, there’s no demand. Not quite. Demand is independent of supply.
  - some_random 3y ago
    I think they mean demand for reddit, which I don't think is the typical usage of the word but still makes sense to me
  - 411111111111111 3y ago
    The demand for information and entertainment is independent from Reddit supplying it, yes. But if everyone used shreddid, this demand could no longer be fulfilled on the Reddit platform, thus the demand for Reddit would cease.
- jghn 3y ago
  This is cutting off one's nose to spite their face. It's not like it'll be replaced by a new trove of historical conversations going back over a decade. That's still valuable to people not named Reddit.
  - gabereiser 3y ago

Nowado 3y ago

It takes quite a bit of forethought to do something that hurts users of an app without hurting the owners of the app. The experience you're describing is part of the point and it's bad for the owners of the app.

tayo42 3y ago

One of the worst things about reddit communities is how hostile they are to content not on reddit. Now so much content is stuck on there, owned by a company instead of the by the writer. Post your own blog on reddit, mignt as well have committed a war crime.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> Post your own blog on reddit, mignt as well have committed a war crime. Many subreddits are fine with posting a link to your own content, as long as you observe the 10% rule mentioned in the Reddit wiki: for every one link to your own content, you should be posting 9 links to content you are not affiliated with. You should also be participating in the discussions on the subreddit instead of just linking and running. When you see how many e.g. travel subs have been overrun with links to people’s own YouTube channels, so they can pursue the dream of being influencers, it is easy to understand why there is little patience for flagrant self-promotion.
- tayo42 3y ago
  ive heard that rule and in hindsight, i think it was a bad idea for people to stick with that. 90% is arbitrary to start with. what is wrong with self promotion anyway? Its no different then ads, which we've mostly accepted. Its at least a person that wants to try. Reddit is a link aggregator. The average user doesn't run an adblock. We have people writing massive reddit posts instead of just writing their own blog. why do people do this? In the case of travel, you make it seem like there is a bunch of deep content being posted otherwise. travel sub reddits are pretty bad. r/Travel is anyway dominated by pictures and low effort posts, for karma I guess? For any discussion, if you go off the accepted ideas you'll be met with hostility and closed mindedness. travelnopics was made and its barely alive. digitalnomad and solotravel are filled with escapist fantasy and insecurity posts.
  - zem 3y ago
    > Its no different then ads, which we've mostly accepted. I don't know which "we" you're talking about; at the very most some users tolerate ads as a thing they can skim over while looking for the actual content they want to read. having self promotion where the actual content should be defeats the entire purpose of the site.

surgical_fire 3y ago

> doesn't hurt Reddit It absolutely does hurt Reddit, if enough users suddenly remove their whole history from Reddit. Reddit ia nothing without the content that exists there. I'll be overwriting and then removing all my posts from there tonight.

monitron 3y ago
My thinking was that Reddit has always been a "news" site, and the majority of what active, ad-consuming users are looking at is likely to be content added in the last few days. It feels like this is only becoming more true as time goes on; modern social networks seem to actively discourage looking through the archives. I could be missing something, like AI training as someone else pointed out.
- pr0zac 3y ago
  I agree the majority of the value is in the current activity but theres definitely some in the historical data, both for AI training (as you mentioned) and for people looking for information on topics that have been discussed in the past. My assumption though is Reddit has already done the math regarding the threat of reduced value as a knowledge repository from people deleting comments/posts and decided the value they lose from pissing people off is smaller than what they gain from the changes that everyone is angry about. Especially because they probably keep backups they can pull from and (as people have pointed out) historical post/comment data is already archived and available all over the internet. Legally that data is still the property of Reddit so if AI companies want to use it without breaking laws they'll need to pay them for it.
troyvit 3y ago
> if enough users suddenly remove their whole history from Reddit. Reddit has around 52 million users according to this unknown source I dug up[1]. Only the people who care the most about this situation will actually delete their posts (especially with a python script). What's that, like 500k people? So yeah only the "best" data will be removed from Reddit, but that's not even the data that makes them money. It's your data, remove it, but I think it's an illusion that it'll hurt Reddit any. [1] https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-daily-active-users https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-daily-active-users

Siecje 3y ago

Can you keep the comments but remove them from your account so they are anonymous?

freeplay 3y ago
Not truly anonymous but if you just delete your account, the comments will remain and the author will be `[deleted]`

complianceowl 3y ago

I actually perceived this as helping people who may want to remove inappropriate comments that they've made over time. In the current age where propagandists from all walks of life dig up old comments to cancel people, I think this may be very useful for Reddit users.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

It won't matter much either; there's services out there that hoover up every comment ever posted, keeping a post, comment and edit history for forever.

devsegal 3y ago

Agreed. It's the same for me, along with the value I place on my own comments :) But the number of times I've combed over the Internet only to find myself in an obscure Reddit thread to find the most astounding of answers is astounding in and of itself. I'd urge those considering to take additional time before making such a move.

simion314 3y ago

I agree. People will be hurt by this. I always hate when I find the thing I need in google but when I open the page the forum was closed or the post was removed.

veidr 3y ago

I canceled my sub to that website tonight, too. But I wish this could edit the posts to show something like "Post removed because Reddit proved themselves to be cunts in 2023, but you can find it on my blog at fuckspez.com/2789892" Because it is true that the loss of the posts would be a net negative for humanity in general. It does suck to find the answer to your esoteric problem iin the search results, only to find that it is actually deleted when you try to click through. But OTOH the posts are literally the only value reddit has, so leaving them on reddit is aiding and abetting shitty cunts fucking over their own users. It's also important — a moral issue, even — to punish them for doing that.

seanw444 3y ago
It's karma for leaving such a wealth of knowledge on a proprietary platform.
- veidr 3y ago
  I kind of feel the same way, or at least I used to, by default, and in private I ridiculed my friends for being on twitter for over a decade, and always referred to it as "walmart.com" because it seemed so stupid to me to use a corporate-owned site to post your own thoughts and whatevers, where you aren't even the customer... ... BUT!!! ... ...eventually my own twitter feed was fucking awesome, because that is where the people are, and I followed the right mix of 60-70 people. Not too much content, but really good. I didn't post there, but I read it several times a week. Then the oligarch weirdo guy bought it, and began disgracing himself and the company in various ways — one of the more generally insignificant (but personally repugnant) of them being that his own ignorant (or not?) retweeting of Nazi memes and self-owns belittling his own disabled employees etc ETC began surfacing in my feed to a degree that the programmatic intervention was obvious — so I was like, gross, this is disgusting, this is not for me (and also: I was right ...) So I left. But then I joined Mastodon and tried to follow the same people, but not all of them were there. And there were hardly any racists or bigots or mysoginists, which you wouldn't maybe think I'd miss, but compared to twitter the Mastodon feed I got (and still have so far) is like dad jokes and "science is real" followed by "yes indeed, science is real, look at these interesting new papers" and no sick evisceration of science-denier guy because the science-denier guy isn't even there. And I'm not even saying I am unhappy that the science-denier guy isn't allowed on any of the instances my instance federates with (or, more likely, doesn't know about and has never even heard of Mastodon). I'm just saying it's boring. So I don't expect most of my Twitter people to show up. And so that is where I have — belatedly and grudgingly — come to accept the value of these corporate cunts and their proprietary platforms: they get people to show up. So I walked back my fuck you walmart.com or whatever the fuck stance, one notch. I no longer just whip out my dick and piss all over any proprietary platform. I concede there may be some bargain to be struck. If you make it easy enough to participate that we end up getting to see Grady Booch and MC Hammer discuss the nature of machine consciousness, or the true innovators in whatever the fuck we care about have interesting discussions... then, well, that's not nothing. It even might go on as a win-win for years, even a decade or perhaps two. But there's an implicit balance there, which requires both sides to act in good faith. Even though we aren't the customer, because your customers buys ads which you annoyingly insert into what we're looking at... if it's not too much, most of us are maybe OK. But this probably means that even if these arrangements work, the time is always limited. Because when the corporation whips out its dick and pisses all over us then... I mean, I think that means not only that the relationship is over, but also fuck you and fuck your IPO and we hope you don't make it, and if we can without inconveniencing ourselves too much, we'll torpedo that shit, because you fucked us over. But like I don't think any of that happens in this case without the proprietary platform, because there never would have been any platform at all.

flyinghamster 3y ago

> Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!" The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone. I've had that happen to me as well, as if someone anticipated exactly what I was looking for and nuked it. It's part of why I've never more than lurked on Reddit. I was on the fence about actually creating an account, but this sort of thing as well as our current drama have seriously lowered that likelihood.

monitron 3y ago
haha, my sentiment exactly on how cosmically unfortunate those occasions can seem. If your experience is common, though, you are making an excellent counterpoint to mine. If the [deleted] posts stop people from becoming active users, that hits 'em right where it hurts.

hk1337 3y ago

https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/

HotGarbage 3y ago

Pushshift already scraped your data and it's now floating around in torrents and on Archive.org. Someone will make a new way to access it without the soon-to-be-IPO'd reddit gatekeepers. I say delete it all!

troyvit 3y ago

I second this. There are few reliable[1] online sources for what now passes as social history, and Reddit is one of them. Destroying that history just to hurt a company seems antithetical to what the WWW is. We should be preserving its content instead. [1] Maybe "reliable" is a strong word, but it's slowly becoming all we have. Search engines are dissolving into meaningless key-word-driven ad machines (even you ddg), Stackoverflow is getting subsumed by bots, etc. Finding truth on the web is going to be more and more difficult and draining Reddit won't help.

samstave 3y ago

If there are LLMs that trained on all avail /u/ comments - then maybe they will live into perpetuity in the AI HiveMind? And - I want to delete my 17 years worth of comments, but dont have access to my account any longer - so I guess reddit gets to squat on them. -- You know what would be REALLY interesting: telling an AI to crawl all your comment history and build a compendium of your reddit experience year by year, or sub by sub... and give you stats and graphs of things... I know there are some sites that will eval your comments and tell your your writing level/comprehension...

pr0zac 3y ago

I'm really sad Reddit murdered Pushshift and as a result murdered unddit.com also. It still works to undelete comments from before May 1st but doesn't for anything after and because future functionality is dead I have to imagine the site isn't gonna be up much longer just to provide historical info. And yeah, I'd run the script to hurt Reddit's historical data value but I don't think I've ever posted anything meaningful or useful over there. Arguments about the NBA and video games aren't really highly searched topics.

hombre_fatal 3y ago

Honestly, I don't see why we should care that other people can't find our comments in the future. That's a lucky side-effect of how comments never expire rather than our intent when conversing online, and the permanence of our comments also causes a lot of problems like accidental oversharing to people we were never talking to in the first place. Something Gen Z gets right is preferring to localize their friend group discussions in more ephemeral places like Discord. HNers get mad that they can't google "best blender 2023 site:discord" but who cares. IMO it was an accident in the first place that all of our utterances online are broadcast to everyone for eternity when we're almost always only talking to a handful of people, and only for the moment.

thomasahle 3y ago
> That's a lucky side-effect of how comments never expire rather than our intent when conversing online, A lot of online discussion might be a lot more pleasant if people considered the perspective of themselves, or people they care about, reading their comments years in the future. For sites like stackoverflow the intend is clearly to leave a lasting record of information, perhaps even more than answering the original persons question.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  > A lot of online discussion might be a lot more pleasant if people considered the perspective of themselves, or people they care about, reading their comments years in the future. Or maybe that hasn't worked so well because it's not a sane default nor the one we operate in when we converse with others on a site like Reddit. For example, I'd like to see the argument for why my utterances on a site like Reddit need to be online forever and why I should want them to be. I can see why that's good for Reddit, but not why I should care. HN doesn't let you delete comments. Yet nobody can even respond to my comments in the future. So it's a feature that does nothing for me no matter how great my comments might be.
  - thomasahle 3y ago
    It's like writing a blogpost in a conversational format. A way for you to share your thoughts with the world. If you only want to share them with a single person, a phone call would probably be better.

bhaak 3y ago

> Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!" The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone. That's why I often quote the relevant stuff from comments I reply to. It's an old Usenet habit but also a way of ensuring that stuff that was interesting to me is not lost. > Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :) You never know if down the line some of your thoughts would be useful to some people or not. :)

tripa 3y ago
>> Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :) > You never know if down the line some of your thoughts would be useful to some people or not. :) Well they're always useful to those people training LLMs, for one.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

justinator 3y ago

>I might be missing the point I used a unique identifying username that points to my real name, and I decided I'd like to express my right to be forgotten. Your reasons may be different, but that's a good one for me! If this is the last time this is easily going to be attained without jumping through flaming hoops working directly with reddit, I'm happy to take that opportunity.

ilyt 3y ago

> I think investors probably care a lot more about current engagement numbers than they care about a deep trove of old, intact discussions. Well technically if most done it the reddit would probably get noticeably less traffic from search engines. Would need to be significant part of userbase for it to have any effect

jimmySixDOF 3y ago

Just make sure to take your data with you whatever you do !! https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043048352-How-do-I-request-a-copy-of-my-Reddit-data-and-information https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304835... https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

bmitc 3y ago

Oh well. People shouldn't feel entitled to other people's data. Every conversation ever doesn't need to be recorded for eternity.

xfitm3 3y ago

You sacrifice privacy – societal norms change over time and what was once acceptable can no longer be.

bl_valance 3y ago

I second this. I don't see the point of deleting our own stuff, it's like burning books from a library of unique books.

neilv 3y ago

Many times I've gotten an answer from old Reddit threads, but many other times (in recent years) the likely answer is in a deleted Reddit comment. It's as bad as when an OP posts a "Nevermind, I figured it out." comment without saying what they figured out. Also: https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/

Rudism 3y ago

I debated this several years ago (when they released their horrendous redesign and "old" Reddit became a thing, which in my mind signaled the inevitability of what's going on right now). In the end I decided to go through with the full deletion of all my posts and comments instead of just deleting the account for a few reasons: 1. I felt like my content existing on Reddit could give the incorrect impression that I still support the site in some fashion, which I did/do not. 2. I'd been on Reddit for over a decade and was a very different person from when I first signed up, and even though I don't think I posted anything particularly offensive or problematic I still had a fear that some ancient thing I said could some day be used against me. 3. If I had simply deleted my account I would no longer have any control over my old content, so the easiest way to put my mind at ease was to blanket delete everything. Not to put my younger self down or anything, but I don't think too much of value was lost. The tiny amount of content that I was particularly proud of continued to exist on other sites anyway.

knoopx 3y ago

how it will not hurt reddit given any search result will give them a chance to throw you some ads? fuck reddit, i'm deleting everything. you can always use web cache.