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Personally, I wiped all of my personal Reddit accounts last year. I now use short-lived anonymous accounts which I also wipe after awhile. I use Shreddit [^0] t
by ezekg 3y ago
Personally, I wiped all of my personal Reddit accounts last year. I now use short-lived anonymous accounts which I also wipe after awhile. I use Shreddit [^0] to wipe the account before deleting it. I do wish that I was able to backup some valuable conversations, but I honestly wouldn't find much worth in the backups without the additional context. So perhaps something to explore -- also storing the context of a particular comment with a configurable depth.
[^0]: https://github.com/x89/Shreddit https://github.com/x89/Shreddit
- brunoqc 3y agoHow on earth are you able to live without your reddit karma? I mean, I don't own a house or have a family, but at least I have 475 reddit points.
- samwillis 3y agoHN Karma obviously!
- revskill 3y agoWhat's the point of HN Karma honestly ?
- samwillis 3y agoEndorphins when you see it going up.
- tazjin 3y agoSome HN features are gated on karma.
- warning26 3y agoOnce you have more than 500, you unlock downvotes! Worth it for that alone.
- revskill 3y agoDoes HN have any guidance on when and why to downvote ? Or just personally ?
- tmpob 3y agoIn my experience it's when you post something that someone has a strong opposing opinion about. Same for flagging, seems to be treated as a super-downvote most of the time.
- cratermoon 3y agoIn the guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html see the section "In Comments". Comments violating those guidelines are reasonable candidates for downvoting.
- revskill 3y ago[flagged]
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoPaul Graham has posted his thoughts about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 I think that sites really shouldn't have guidance on this sort of thing, because nobody would follow it anyway. If you only have upvotes and downvotes, people are just going to upvote stuff they like and downvote stuff they don't like, and any individual will have different rules about what "like" or "doesn't like" means to them. Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful", "Funny", "Off topic", etc.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoDownvoting. But it's easy to karma whore up to 500.
- sowerssix 3y agoI'm not even sure how I got to 2. I rarely bother to comment, yet here we are.
- 0zemp3c 3y agoreplacement for real life achievement
- red-iron-pine 3y agomake the groupthink easier to track via API
- nickpeterson 3y agoI trade mine in for its current dollar value by messaging pg and he wires over the cash.
- egeozcan 3y agoAre you really asking what's the point of having... points? They are points!
- _cenw 3y agoI would absolutely trade in public displays of karma for having a random username assigned to every one of my posts with my history being obscured while still keeping track of "karma" for moderation / feature gating.
- dfxm12 3y agoNot sure if you mean keeping track of total upvotes or just the voting system in general. In either case, just for a start, I think discussions are easier to have & follow along with when someone can just upvote a comment to engage in the discussion vs posting something like "+1" or "^ this" or "I agree", and the number is the same feedback in lieu of meaningless posts. Voting also helps with ordering (as opposed to time based ordering), whether your total karma is displayed or not.
- paulddraper 3y agoThat deep feeling of fulfillment.
- krapp 3y agoThe same point everywhere - to drive discussion to popular posts and away from unpopular posts, and to encourage conformity to board culture through operant conditioning and gamification. If you give people a number and tell them that number is special, they'll do whatever they can to make that number go up, and to avoid whatever makes it go down. At least in theory. In practice it's utterly useless because it's based on incorrect (or possibly outdated) assumptions about the nature and goals of HN's userbase (which I've decided to call the "good hacker" fallacy.)
- bckr 3y agoTo give you dreams like the done I had last night where I lost 6 points and decided to delete my comment so I wouldn’t lose any more.
- ilyt 3y agoSee the key is to get into thousands and not care about 0.1% changes either way. Bollock enough and someone will upvote it.
- swayvil 3y agoIt empowers us to disappear distasteful opinions.
- MSFT_Edging 3y agoThat sweet ability to downvote.
- JohnFen 3y agoImpressing the ladies!
- tazjin 3y agoGood news: Your karma stays around even after you delete all your posts/comments!
- chaostheory 3y agoBad news: it depends on how you delete your comments. If you just delete your comments via the delete button, Reddit will still archive your last 1000 comments and posts. Not sure how shreddit and other similar apps work, but I think you need to update and replace your old posts with something blank like a space before you delete them. My knowledge might be out of date, so feel free to point out that I’m wrong.
- barbazoo 3y agoIt replaces the comment with a predefined string: https://github.com/x89/Shreddit/blob/master/shreddit/shredder.py#L115-L128 https://github.com/x89/Shreddit/blob/master/shreddit/shredde...
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoI laughed.
- numpad0 3y ago475? Not 47.5k? I think you can easily have 7.5k per 3 months or so on Reddit. HN is way harder.
- stefncb 3y agoThe average upvote count for comments here is 5, anecdotally. On reddit it can be in the dozens, even hundreds depending on subreddit. My abandoned reddit account I had for 2 years had 39k karma, and I wasn't obsessed.
- ilyt 3y agoI disagree, it's extremely easy on both. Like, sure, it is slower on HN but community is also smaller
- vidanay 3y agoYeah, my most recent throwaway Reddit account has 62.5k in only 9 months.
- EMCymatics 3y agoIt is impossible to interact in some subreddits if you dont have xyz karma or have a # weeks old account
- red-iron-pine 3y agofor most sites like that... i probably don't want to be there anyway. except HN of course
- hello_moto 3y agoYou don't interact. Let them die slowly.
- PaulHoule 3y agoIt is the normal lifecycle that platforms die. Look at MySpace.
- hello_moto 3y agoYou don't interact. Let them die slowly. Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway. What's the point to get your "2c" heard in Reddit? Redditors are the minorities.
- penultimatename 3y agoI'm going to miss the computer hardware sell/trade subreddits, they're one of the most active I've found and saves 20-40% over eBay or similar. All require a minimum account age and karma to reduce the risk of scammers.
- jmondi 3y agoCurious why you are contributing here? Arguably, Hacker News is a lot of an echo chamber too. What’s the point to get your “2c” heard on Hacker News? Hacker News users are even more of a minority than Redditors.
- 3y ago
- ok_dad 3y agoPfff, I’m collecting HN points for a rainy day; they’re worth at least 10 Reddit points each!
- egeozcan 3y agoEvery time someone down-votes me here, they kill my future, bit by bit.
- lyu07282 3y agoI have ~100k on reddit, but somehow hacker news managed to make my ~500 points feel far more valuable.
- 13of40 3y agoMan, those are Hacker News numbers. About 300 times as many people have upvoted my drunken rants on Reddit.
- ilyt 3y agoThat's like whole week of commenting!
- corobo 3y agoHopefully one day we can redeem it for cash with all that API money they're making off the posts that generated it :)
- nerdbert 3y agoThere was a time when you could get bitcoin for your reddit karma... back when spending several bitcoin for a pizza was a thing.
- delgaudm 3y agoSomewhat OT, but I think it's interesting that YC has specifically employed patterns on HN to prevent deleting the comments you've made.
- Sebb767 3y agoI actually like that. It's quite often that I stumble upon an older Reddit thread when searching something specific and the (presumably) valuable comments are just [deleted]. True, people might want to erase some things they said, but it makes Reddit a lot less valuable as a search resource.
- rektide 3y agoI agree. The fear mongering & sending yourself to /dev/null is out of hand. To me a particularly virulent new pattern that is super anti-social. I think most of ya'll are enduringly good humans & we're better as a world with your thoughts shared.
- wpietri 3y agoMaybe you could trust that these enduringly good humans have decided to do things for reasons that suit them?
- rektide 3y agoThere's so much discussion about deleting yourself. There should be some words online encouraging people not to jump into black holes. I hope people consider & think on the loss that self-deleting causes, when considering.
- kzrdude 3y agoI think it's rather the other way around. People self-delete comments because they feel they don't dare to be themselves. The risk is very low but the consequence is high if you get targeted online in various ways (someone has a grudge and doxes you, or you are the target of a social media pile-on)
- wkat4242 3y agoI also used shreddit a year or two ago. Though for more personal reasons. It's so great I could delete my old history completely.
- tmpob 3y agoYour posts and comments will still be available in the Pushshift dumps. These have been released as torrents, so there are many thousands of copies of these already.
- wkat4242 3y agoOh yeah I'm sure they are but it was more about the feeling of it. I wish more platforms offered this. I rotate all my accounts every year or so, same with this one.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoAlso the Internet Archive.
- yieldcrv 3y agoin my experience, its always the current digital trail that gets anybody interested in more sleuthing and archives on different sites arent used to link to a current digital trail Like if you were running for political office, nobody is going to start with the archive to try to match to an unknown current user that they further want to link to the candidate. They’ll start with the candidate and try to link to a current username and then maybe extend that to archives of related usernames. But if you really nuke and start over you’re fine, people just aren’t that motivated. Your own witness protection program.
- tmpob 3y agoI do the same on Reddit and similar sites (including HN), though I never delete any comments, just the accounts. I've become increasingly uneasy about leaving a digital trail, especially as there are increasingly advanced techniques to correlate accounts via stylometry. For Reddit specifically, if I needed to, I would look up old comments in Pushshift if I could remember enough information to locate them - keywords, approximate date, subreddit, username. It's somewhat annoying that this service no longer exists. Though there are dumps, and backups of those dumps, so hopefully someone will release a similar search tool for these, eventually. Perhaps also including the data scraped by Archive Team. Maybe I'll have a crack at it myself as a side project.
- faangsticle 3y agoHN doesn't allow you to delete comments anyway. You can try emailing dang and he'll give you some excuse about how he doesn't need to care about GDPR and data protection laws.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoTo be fair HN is purely a US entity; GDPR doesn't apply as much as the EU might insist it does.
- faangsticle 3y agoYCombinator, the parent of HN, does business in the EU.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoThat I did not know. Thanks for clarifying.
- KolmogorovComp 3y agoGDPR applies as long as your service is used by EU citizens[0]. [0]: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/application-regulation/who-does-data-protection-law-apply_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
- tazjin 3y agoI've been using this: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/ https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/ It runs client-side in the browser and has filter & export functionality if you want to retain anything.
- IanCal 3y agoI tried this but it found only a portion of my comments, and exported less than 200. Just be careful to check things before deleting
- spiderice 3y agoIt looks like Shreddit relies on the Reddit API to work. Is this tool going to break with the API changes? Or is personal API usage unaffected?
- hunter2_ 3y agoFrom what I've read, personal API keys (issued to anyone) will continue to work fine, but apps that expose a way to use arbitrary keys (like in a settings UI, rather than hard-coded at build time) will be deemed in violation of ToS, specifically so that personal keys can't easily be used by the masses as a workaround for apps that have a 1:many dev:user ratio. If you can build an app (or clone what someone else has built) that contains your key, you can proceed. This is fairly high friction for mobile apps, like building/patching an .apk and side loading it.
- gsich 3y agoI have gone over to fullquote any comment I make on reddit because of this toxic style. It's not exclusively your comment anymore if you post it to a public place.
- ncr100 3y agoAnother option to nuke .. Last night I wiped my old and well used account with Android App "Redact": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.redact.app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.redact.app
- faangsticle 3y agoI did the same, and reddit actually chain banned ("suspended" as they call it) the remainder of my accounts and started banning any account as I made it, until I made sure to wipe their tracking cookies & switch to a new IP.
- btbuildem 3y agoI make sure to tether off my phone when doing weird ops on reddit, they can't seem to correlate the banks of mobile IPs with my accounts (yet).
- rootusrootus 3y agoI do the same thing. I wonder how inflated the subscriber count is on many popular subreddits.
- leokennis 3y agoI also open short lived anonymous accounts. I just sign up using a temporary more or less anonymous mail address (lots of sites that offer this), input a bogus birth date to be able to see all posts, recreate my subscriptions and multireddits and I’m good to go for another 6 months.
- sdfghswe 3y agoUhhh why don't you apply the standard to HN?
- irrational 3y agoI've been using Redact. Does anyone know the difference between Shreddit and Redact?
- abcd_f 3y agoDo you destroy your comments that have replies though? If you do, that's a fairly nasty and thoughtless thing to do and I would strongly encourage you to revise your approach to commenting and/or privacy.
- riversflow 3y agoCompletely disagree. Not archiving/recording everything for eternity has be the de facto modus operandi of the human race since time immemorial. Reddit had the privilege of hosting user comments, and they squandered the trust they built. Social networks live and die by the good will of their users, creators/users taking back what they made is the consequence of acting in a way that users don't like. Deleting all my comments out of every conversation I had on reddit and destroying all the value is the point, I don't want Reddit to have that value.
- joemi 3y ago> Deleting all my comments out of every conversation I had on reddit and destroying all the value is the point, I don't want Reddit to have that value. So, "if I can't have it, no one can"? That's something parents typically try to teach toddlers _not_ to do.
- MSFT_Edging 3y agoIn this scenario, "no one can" is the uncaring corporation who has chosen a path to ruin any good will with the community. The content people have created for free on reddit is literally the only form of leverage they have aside from actually going to the site. Sure some lost soul could use that tidbit of info, but they'll only have Reddit to blame.
- joemi 3y agoYes, "no one can" means "the uncaring corporation", but it ALSO means "everyone else in the entire world". > Sure some lost soul could use that tidbit of info, but they'll only have Reddit to blame. No, reddit isn't making anyone delete all their content. The person deleting all their content is to blame. They could just walk away, but instead, they're purposefully making reddit worse for everyone.
- LukeShu 3y agoYou know what I love? Finding threads like this in > OP: Posts a question > Anon: [deleted by shreddit/PowerDeleteSuite/whatever] > OP: Thanks, that solved my issue! It's a modern version of https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ !
- PragmaticPulp 3y agoGiven that data collection companies would have long since archived your comments into their data stores, deleting all of your comments after a few years is likely only harming everyone else trying to read old threads through the website (rather than data collection archives). It’s becoming increasingly frustrating to read old Reddit threads about technical issues where someone went back and deleted all of their posts. Trying to guess what was discussed by reading every other comment is a frustrating experience.
- fireflash38 3y agoI get the frustration, but it still would to put pressure on them. Because even though the data might have been scraped/bought, it means that people would not go to reddit to find information, as it'd be deleted/worthless. So yes, it's acknowledging that you can't take back the scraped data, but you can at least poison the well for others who would use it. And yes, it would harm current users of reddit. That's kind of the point, because I don't think reddit makes any significant changes unless they get significant pushback from the thing they're trying to sell -- #s of users.
- DangitBobby 3y agoIf it was a big problem for Reddit they'd probably make it impossible.
- riversflow 3y ago> It’s becoming increasingly frustrating to read old Reddit threads Yeah, that's the point. Users are clawing back the value they gave to Reddit because they are angry with the decisions the company has made.
- joemi 3y agoI think that's pretty close to a "if I can't have it no one can" attitude, and it's a net-negative for the world.
- 3y ago
- anifru 3y agoHave you found a quick way to transfer all your subreddit subscriptions and saved posts? I would prefer short-lived anon accounts but have been too lazy to write a script to transfer those myself.
- ezekg 3y agoI save the posts I really care about in my browser bookmarks or copy/paste the valuable contents to a note on my phone. For subs, if I don't resub then I wasn't really interested. Starting a new anon account is a good way to get rid of the cruft in your home feed.
- mcdonje 3y agoIf you simply delete your account, the comments live on but are anonymized. The username is [deleted]. It's a lot easier than deleting all your comments before deleting the account, and as others have said, it preserves the conversation for future people. I'd much rather learn what a bunch of deleted accounts thought about in a thread from 10 years ago than getting only a partial conversation.
- jedahan 3y agoI ran this on my user about an hour ago, and all my messages are still on reddit and also libreddit frontends. I wonder if their api is ignoring the user-agent, or there is a very long cache time.
- william- 3y agoHow ironic that Reddit's new API limits are likely causing an uptick in calls leading up to the change... Not just mass archival / reads, but also database writes from Shreddit usage, etc.
- malablaster 3y agoSame. I delete my Reddit account, posts, and (sometimes) comments regularly because screw that cesspool.
- Aardwolf 3y agoReddit has a lot of good info. This is to the credit of the people posting there. But I hate it when good helpful info or part of a conversation that was going to answer my problem becomes a deleted post because Im GoNnA dElEtE aLl My ReDdIt DaTa
- randombits0 3y agoSo you end up with the value of what you paid. Got it!
- Aardwolf 3y agoPaid ecosystems wouldn't have open discourse at this scale
- asdff 3y agoAll your comments are probably crawled anyhow. You can't delete anything from the internet.
- nabakin 3y agoI wrote this comment a couple years ago, but unless something significant has changed, it still stands. Be careful. Shreddit does not get rid of all reddit comments, only the ones on your profile. Reddit stores a list of the last 1000 comments and posts you've made to your profile and that list is what Shreddit and 99% of reddit 'deletion' tools use. To truly remove all your comments and posts from reddit, look into reddit-shreddit [0]. Despite the similar name, it is completely different and leverages all your posts and comments from a reddit data request to delete all of your reddit posts and comments. It is infact the only method I have found, except for perhaps a GDPR deletion request, that is truly a complete deletion. However, this only covers the deletion from reddit itself. There have been periodic reddit archivals ever since it was created. Up to 2015 they were done yearly, ever since they have been done monthly. Since they have always been up for download, all of your reddit data will still be out there, however you can remove your data from the main source of these archives called pushshift. I haven't done it personally but I've seen it said on reddit, you can email the dev of pushshift or dm him on reddit and he will remove your information from his archive. [0] https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit
- phpisthebest 3y agoThe seems to use the same API that is going to be changing pricing, so I assume one either will no longer be able to create the free api keys required in step 4 of that app's setup instructions
- nabakin 3y agoThe Reddit API will still have a free tier after the changes on July 1st which can be used and Shreddit uses the Reddit API too so it will have the same problem.
- daedalus_j 3y agoThis works, and I certainly respect your choice to do so, but if we ass start doing this it removes a huge amount of the value from the platform. For example I just recently went searching for a solution to a problem, and found 3 reddit posts with what must've been solutions because there were "awesome, works great!" responses, but I'll never know what those solutions were because the user had deleted their posts. I mean, we could all just use Signal with disappearing messages enabled I suppose, that would keep anyone from utilizing "our data"... I fear we'll just doom ourselves to asking the same questions over and over and over and over if we can't build lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge.
- jjav 3y ago> over and over and over and over if we can't build lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge The lesson here is that it is fundamentally impossible to build lasting repositories of knowledge on a proprietary platform owned by some entity. The only solutions that can stand the test of time for the long haul are decentralized systems built on open standardized protocols which are not owned by anyone.
- yencabulator 3y ago> if we [all] start doing this it removes a huge amount of the value from the platform. I think that's the intent. If Reddit turns evil, users can choose to punish the platform for that.
- daedalus_j 3y agoTrue, and I'm all for punishing the platform. When we do so we're also punishing ourselves however. They're losing potential monetary value, we're the ones losing knowledge. (I'm assuming they have full backups and could trivially undo the deletions for purposes such as selling LLM training data, so the amount of harm we're doing them really is only limited to "engagement" numbers) Much like the SO incident, it just makes me increasingly hesitant to contribute to any future platform where the only method of redress the users have is self-harm. Seem some good suggestions in this thread though, so maybe we can come up with something new.
- rekoil 3y agoI have an account that's older than some current reddit users have lived, I've pretty much never deleted anything from it but I plan to replace all comments and threads I've created on that account with something like the following text: "Removed in protest of reddits idiotic 2023-06-30 API rule changes." Shreddit looks like a good tool for this, just have to tweak it so it doesn't actually remove the data, just replace and leave it. Would be fun to also build a tool for restoring the content should reddit reverse its idiotic API decision. But why bother doing that when they wont...