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This is crazy! I like the following comment on kbin: > I said it before and I say it again: if you have the patience to do so then make sure you overwrite your

• dmix 3y ago
  I've actually been thinking about building this sort of thing as a Chrome extension, a generic comment/tweet deleting app. More for privacy reasons than protest ones. The web based services that do this via APIs never seem to stick around long which is why a browser extension makes more sense IMO. The AI thing is clever.
  • flushit 3y ago
    And it will be really hard to look at the database entries that all changed in bulk to distinguish them from legit entries. /s
    • actionfromafar 3y ago
      So make it work in the background then, registering on lots of sub-reddits and similar, and slowly shitpost in all of them.
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Please don’t, that just speeds up the Turing Syndrome The last thing we need is for the internet to be harder to tell truth from fiction [1]https://kemendo.com/blog/turing-syndrome.html https://kemendo.com/blog/turing-syndrome.html
• xmdx 3y ago
  Even that won't work because there are companies like Pushshift (I think it's pushshift anyway) that are constantly archiving comments, so they have the old comment and the overwritten one. I think you can request pushshift delete your data under GDPR so at least you can remove your data from there, but I believe they are not the only ones doing this.
  • melech_ric 3y ago
    Seems like a game of whack-a-mole. A person might get Reddit and Pushshift to delete their comments, but surely there are other less well-known companies mirroring Reddit. Maybe even clandestinely.
  • ghglkl 3y ago
    Pushshift only blocked such data from being queried via their API. All these users' posts and comments are still in their data dumps, which now have tens of thousands of copies after being released as torrents.
• josu 3y ago
  That is what this extension does: https://github.com/sr33/ares https://github.com/sr33/ares It hasn't been maintained in a while, but I can confirm that it still works. EDIT: Here is another alternative. I haven't used this one myself but it seems legit: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
  • sebstefan 3y ago
    ares isn't on the firefox store anymore and PowerDeleteSuite gets responses that are "success: false" 99% of the time because it doesn't fit the throttling they have very well so it leaves huge gaps of un-edited posts in your history Ares can be installed manually but the building process has a few holes, namely, you need to rollback your node version to 13.14.0 and it's not mentioned in the readme. You can use nvm to do that (nvm install 13.14.0 && nvm use 13.14.0), then the normal stuff (npm install && npm run build) I looked for a reddit history editor a while back and found those two as well, it's sad it's hard to make them work unless your account happens to have the throttle it expects
    • Glench 3y ago
      I made a replacement tool that just got approved in the Firefox addons store if you want to try it out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bulk-delete-reddit-history/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bulk-delete-r...
  • Glench 3y ago
    I also recently made a browser extension because those two tools are outdated / hard to use: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit-posts/nbfdoajmaaohkohdnbpjakamhcaaleco?hl=en&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit... Let me know if you try it! Still developing and would love feedback.
    • Shaanie 3y ago
      Personally I'd love to have an upvote and subreddit filter. So "delete all comments except the ones on /r/askscience or the ones with above 100 upvotes".
• reustle 3y ago
  FIND ALL COMMENTS WHERE USER = 12345 AND UPDATED % is > 90%; REVERT ALL COMMENTS
  • nik736 3y ago
    Yes, but that's even crazier when the platform is basically messing with your posts and comments. That's not what a community is. They can generate content that fits their content strategy themselve then, this way they don't need users!
    • Etrnl_President 3y ago
      This is what Cybercommand was about, before AI got smart enough to fool most people.
    • cmcaleer 3y ago
      > the platform is basically messing with your posts and comments Wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last time. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
  • goykasi 3y ago
    I’m not sure what language you’re using, but I’m pretty sure you have a couple of syntax issues and unintended bugs in your code. This definitely isn’t passing any reasonable code review.
    • ohgodplsno 3y ago
      Code reviews ? This goes directly in production, force pushed by spez.
• comboy 3y ago
  They own deleted data too. If I would be selling this data I would just cleanup all edits and deletes starting from a few weeks ago to a time when the Internet gets bored with the drama. In modern chaotic world usually the best weapon against something you don't like is to just ignore it (there are exceptions of course).
  • chongli 3y ago
    Why not use a bot to automatically post brand new chatgpt-generated fake comments in between edits with fake stuff? Or automate making edits that insert/delete/replace one word with a random word? There's many different things to do that could trash the data and make it worthless for training AI. With the right tools, this sort of automation can also be made very difficult to detect (randomize the time interval between edits and the time of day on which they occur [normally distributed during prime time]).
    • comboy 3y ago
      The data is already there. People will get bored with manipulations and they can just ignore current timespan. Even currently, creative individuals is 0.01% of users which is easy to spot with simple heuristics especially given such a small percentage and the fact that false positives don't hurt. Detecting automated / fake content and silently marking it is probably 90% of what coders do there even without the drama. I think they are pretty decent at it. Even if they couldn't distinguish fake content, there's a good chance neither could its buyers so nobody cares. I just think it's a bad fight to choose.
    • NortySpock 3y ago
      Costs more money to develop and run a ChatGPT bot than it is to say UPDATE comments WITH SKIPLOCK SET _soft_deleted_time = null WHERE _soft_deleted_time > '2023-05-01'
      • chongli 3y ago
        Why not shut down the whole site then? They already have an archive of everything from before then. The question is what you do about future content? If it can no longer be trusted then it’s worthless as a dataset for training.
• Communitivity 3y ago
  I am not commenting on whether this is a good thing or not, from my POV that's for each person to decide themselves. However, if this catches on and becomes more prevalent (and I could see that happening), then I'd expect some kind of cyber-vandalism law to be enacted. They can't prosecute based on hacking, because it isn't. But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property by editing to add content that knowingly will mess with their algs. Sooner than that though will be an addition to the EULA, that users cannot enter AI generated content or they agree to get fined, or some such nastiness. The Cyberpunk RPG came out in 1988, and I was in my early 20s. Each decade since I've marvelled at how much closer to that dystopian world we've gotten, and the slope of the downward slide increases every decade. Why do I say that? Because the image of Reddit that's been in my head until today is of an Open Source type thing started by Aaron Schwartz. He was a founder, but that is not today's Reddit. I did some cursory digging and found Reddit is primarily owned (majority shareholder) by Advance Publications, Inc. These are the same people who own, or majorly own (primary or major shareholder): Conde Nast and all its subsidiaries (which now owns Ars Technica), American City Business Journals, Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery, the Ironman Triathlons, many newspapers, Turnitin.com, and probably more. In 2019 Advance Publications was named the largest privately owned American company.
  • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    > But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property But it's your comment. While I'm sure there's legalese in the T's & C's that you hand over all rights to your comment over to Reddit or release it under a permissive license, that doesn't make it right or just. And I think reddit and other communities rely on keeping up the appearance that they respect you and your works, even if they're just shitpost comments.
    • brucethemoose2 3y ago
      They are not your comments. They are Reddit's. And TBH the perception of owning your comments doesn't really matter in the short term... people don't care, they just want to post. In the long term the actual content creators won't like it, but that is a problem for another owner.
• chaosjevil 3y ago
  That reasoning is similar to the one that I've found in r/RedditAlternatives: they're proposing to replace the content with random crap from a conlang generator. EDIT: found the pic https://i.imgur.com/45M3a8c.png https://i.imgur.com/45M3a8c.png
• PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  This is basically spamming, but with a time delay so the moderators won’t see it. Worse, the data is already archived by the data collection services. The people who suffer are going to be average users trying to find some answer to a question by searching Reddit, only to discover jumbled messes of words that don’t make sense.
  • donkeyd 3y ago
    > The people who suffer are going to be average users I already notice this just with the blackout. Some stuff I find on Google is in private subs now, so I can't view it on Reddit. Sure, there might be ways around it, but regular people won't know that.
    • officeplant 3y ago
      Every niche technical issue I've googled this week has at least one privated subreddit link now. As much as it sucks we needed a wake up call yet again. No one learned when forums would vanish with vast amounts of information.
• jader201 3y ago
  I’ve never created an account on Reddit, but in general, I’m surprised to hear they even allow editing older content. Most discussion-based/social media sites have logic that locks the comment after so much time (often some timespan less than 1 day), and only allow deletion after that point. I would also be surprised if Reddit didn’t add such logic if they figure out this (editing older content to replace it with gibberish) is happening. It seems like reasonable logic to have in place anyway. To be clear, I’m not siding with Reddit on this. Just saying it seems odd they even allow it in the first place, especially for comments — the top level post may make sense to allow edits, but even then there’s usually a publicly visible edit history.
  • Semaphor 3y ago
    I actually only ever saw something like that twice, HN and our issue tracker.
• aprentic 3y ago
  Do you know if any of the "delete my reddit posts" apps support this? Maybe even an option to keep it running and randomly update posts with GPT nonsense over time?