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You can incrementally delete your posts and interactions while backing them up. Once done, you can request your user data to verify that deletion has taken plac

You can incrementally delete your posts and interactions while backing them up. Once done, you can request your user data to verify that deletion has taken place, and then cancel the account. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite , this and other tools make it easy to manage. Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value seems primarily as a customer support resource for companies outside the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other platforms. Reddit's going the way of MySpace. Unless you like burning money, this IPO is one to skip. All the things that made Reddit great, once, are gone now. There are no compelling reasons to use it; it's slow, intrusive, disrespectful to user privacy, performatively moralizing and preachy, caters to the worst sort of moderation and curation power dynamics, and serves no relevant purpose in the ecosystem of the modern internet. The best and only value of Reddit comes from older archives of scraped content now used as training data for AI.

mr_mitm 3y ago
> Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value seems primarily as a customer support resource for companies outside the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other platforms. It's so sad. They really had a good thing going. I like to believe that it could have been a sustainable marvel of the internet of the likes of Wikipedia, if they had just stuck to reddit gold and non-intrusive ads for the revenue. How much can it cost to keep the servers going? The source code for the old reddit seems pretty stable and not like it requires tons of maintenance or the attention of many devs.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  That's because Wikipedia isn't run by a Silicon Valley swamp creature. It provides a decent living for those who run the corporate side of things, but was never intended to create millionaires. Keeping the servers running isn't a cost that will grow exponentially; you need a lack of focus on the product by incompetent people who think they should be unfathomably wealthy to get the revenue demands that Reddit has now.
dabluecaboose 3y ago
Fair warning, I used PowerDeleteSuite and Reddit seems to have backfilled a bunch of deleted comments while keeping them off my user page. Every now and then I'll read an old thread and see my username and have to manually delete the comment.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  Same. Also happened to my brother's account after we thought we'd nuked everything.
  - dorchadas 3y ago
    I used to use Shreddit and other tools and the same thing has happened. Even worse, they give me notifications if someone replies in a sub that didn't opt-in to archive mode (another dumb decision; should've been opt-out), but I can delete them.
    - dabluecaboose 3y ago
      >Even worse, they give me notifications if someone replies in a sub that didn't opt-in to archive mode (another dumb decision; should've been opt-out), God, that is just the WORST concept especially nowadays. I was looking for info on water filtes and found a bunch of ChatGPT comments from 3 months ago on an 8 year old thread shilling for some company. Of course, they were all upvoted to the top of the thread. I even had a notification of someone just commenting "lol" on an offhand comment I made about Firefly in 2011. As if that needed to be said.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    If you were doing this during the protests, comments on closed (protesting) subreddits were hidden from users' profiles until the sub reopened.
- callalex 3y ago
  This seems very illegal in some places.
unethical_ban 3y ago
One of the most valuable long-form posts I have seen in the past year was a few days ago, about the absolute dangers of reddit and other social media sites due to nation-state disinformation. Ironic. "You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed." https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/ https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_t... (Notice the "old" in the domain, because the new layout and all the apps are designed not for maximum utility, but for ad revenue). There is so much more unoriginal content on reddit now. So little that is interesting or inspiring. It takes true effort to find content that is the combination of Interesting AND Original. /r/all is to Instagram what BoredPanda was/is to reddit: stale, shitty content maintained by bots and influencers.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  Related video I saw yesterday: TikTok is a Cyberweapon[0]. I don't love the way he presented the idea, a bit handwavey and not properly acknowledging the fact that TikTok is only different from other socials because it's a) very good algorithm-wise, and b) Chinese. But the demo of how one would astroturf a protest was very convincing. He should have just done it, it would have been groundbreaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7WzqUq4Nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7WzqUq4Nk
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    Agreed. It's a problem across the board. Insta can do the same thing. It's just that one is US agitprop, one is Chinese. We need to train our friends and citizens on how to be effective at changing the world around them and at communicating, and how not to let social media influence them directly. Sadly, the people who are otherwise smart who I know are further left totally reject mainstream media as "complicit in US government crimes" and so on.
lenerdenator 3y ago
I'll have to check out that tool. Generalized social media is looking more and more like a mistake. There were previously forums, and they were centered around a topic. Then Reddit and Facebook came around and killed those by making it easy to create and find those communities. Now they're coming back. I want a local equivalent to Reddit, without the rest of Reddit. Beyond that, I don't need more social media that has no link to my IRL activities. Also, the comparison to MySpace isn't fair. Tom was far cooler than spez ever will be. <lereddit>We did it, HN! This is exactly what I'm looking for. Take my updoot, kind stranger!</lereddit>
- breischl 3y ago
  Isn't the local equivalent of Reddit just NextDoor? Which seems to mostly be worse, from what I can tell.

mr_mitm 3y ago

> Reddit has hamfistedly broken whatever value it once had as a platform for long form discussion, with the interesting and valuable fringe, hobbyist, and obscure niche forums having been banned or moderated into inane milquetoast. Now, its value seems primarily as a customer support resource for companies outside the US, or as a platform for attracting clicks on other platforms. It's so sad. They really had a good thing going. I like to believe that it could have been a sustainable marvel of the internet of the likes of Wikipedia, if they had just stuck to reddit gold and non-intrusive ads for the revenue. How much can it cost to keep the servers going? The source code for the old reddit seems pretty stable and not like it requires tons of maintenance or the attention of many devs.

lenerdenator 3y ago
That's because Wikipedia isn't run by a Silicon Valley swamp creature. It provides a decent living for those who run the corporate side of things, but was never intended to create millionaires. Keeping the servers running isn't a cost that will grow exponentially; you need a lack of focus on the product by incompetent people who think they should be unfathomably wealthy to get the revenue demands that Reddit has now.

dabluecaboose 3y ago

Fair warning, I used PowerDeleteSuite and Reddit seems to have backfilled a bunch of deleted comments while keeping them off my user page. Every now and then I'll read an old thread and see my username and have to manually delete the comment.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago
Same. Also happened to my brother's account after we thought we'd nuked everything.
- dorchadas 3y ago
  I used to use Shreddit and other tools and the same thing has happened. Even worse, they give me notifications if someone replies in a sub that didn't opt-in to archive mode (another dumb decision; should've been opt-out), but I can delete them.
  - dabluecaboose 3y ago
    >Even worse, they give me notifications if someone replies in a sub that didn't opt-in to archive mode (another dumb decision; should've been opt-out), God, that is just the WORST concept especially nowadays. I was looking for info on water filtes and found a bunch of ChatGPT comments from 3 months ago on an 8 year old thread shilling for some company. Of course, they were all upvoted to the top of the thread. I even had a notification of someone just commenting "lol" on an offhand comment I made about Firefly in 2011. As if that needed to be said.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  If you were doing this during the protests, comments on closed (protesting) subreddits were hidden from users' profiles until the sub reopened.
callalex 3y ago
This seems very illegal in some places.

unethical_ban 3y ago

One of the most valuable long-form posts I have seen in the past year was a few days ago, about the absolute dangers of reddit and other social media sites due to nation-state disinformation. Ironic. "You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed." https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/ https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_t... (Notice the "old" in the domain, because the new layout and all the apps are designed not for maximum utility, but for ad revenue). There is so much more unoriginal content on reddit now. So little that is interesting or inspiring. It takes true effort to find content that is the combination of Interesting AND Original. /r/all is to Instagram what BoredPanda was/is to reddit: stale, shitty content maintained by bots and influencers.

kspacewalk2 3y ago
Related video I saw yesterday: TikTok is a Cyberweapon[0]. I don't love the way he presented the idea, a bit handwavey and not properly acknowledging the fact that TikTok is only different from other socials because it's a) very good algorithm-wise, and b) Chinese. But the demo of how one would astroturf a protest was very convincing. He should have just done it, it would have been groundbreaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7WzqUq4Nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7WzqUq4Nk
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  Agreed. It's a problem across the board. Insta can do the same thing. It's just that one is US agitprop, one is Chinese. We need to train our friends and citizens on how to be effective at changing the world around them and at communicating, and how not to let social media influence them directly. Sadly, the people who are otherwise smart who I know are further left totally reject mainstream media as "complicit in US government crimes" and so on.

lenerdenator 3y ago

I'll have to check out that tool. Generalized social media is looking more and more like a mistake. There were previously forums, and they were centered around a topic. Then Reddit and Facebook came around and killed those by making it easy to create and find those communities. Now they're coming back. I want a local equivalent to Reddit, without the rest of Reddit. Beyond that, I don't need more social media that has no link to my IRL activities. Also, the comparison to MySpace isn't fair. Tom was far cooler than spez ever will be. <lereddit>We did it, HN! This is exactly what I'm looking for. Take my updoot, kind stranger!</lereddit>

breischl 3y ago
Isn't the local equivalent of Reddit just NextDoor? Which seems to mostly be worse, from what I can tell.