When Reddit’s API debacle happened lots of people moved away. Some deleted their comments, some edited them with a message in protest. But sadly the consequences is that a lot of history and useful information got lost in the process.
I don’t know how I feel about this. I understand why it’s done and even why it needs to be done, but it still makes me sad considering the amount of times where Reddit saved me from massive headaches with IT stuff and so on…
As someone who deleted their posts… yes. The goal was to make Reddit worse, by removing my contributions to it because they forgot where their value came from.
My content had some small value to them. They didn’t deserve it.
I hear these justifications a lot, but the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.
The value of the archival data that can be affected by deleting or editing is almost entirely only user-accessed value. Reddit isn’t harmed at all from the edits. It primarily needs active regular users to improve its stock value. Alternatively, it can sell archival data for AI training.
Editing old comments removes neither value source from Reddit. You moved away from it so deprived it of both the material value of new comments and the statistical value of being an active user. Reddit also assuredly has saved data from before the API issue and can likely spot and clean the mass edits to sell the data from training purposes.
Conversely, the value to users and society is high. So many solutions to problems that are gone forever. The Internet is decaying already and it gets harder to find useful information, and those leaving decided to just burn down a library of Alexandria.
It’s their - and your - right, sure. They’re by definition done on comments the user owns. But this is just punching desperate Internet users in the face hoping it gives Reddit a bloody nose.
If that were true, then why did Reddit respond to the mass deletions (that’s what people did at first, not edits) by undeleting the comments?
those leaving decided to just burn down a library of Alexandria.
More like I had my book taken off the shelves because the librarians are dicks
Ah, where are those books now? Which shelves can I find them on?
I get the metaphorical point, but it’s a point without effect. “Removing with no possible present or future access” is the same as “burning” for society’s purposes.
where are those books now?
Lemmy
You’ve reposted all of your deleted Reddit comments to Lemmy?
Nope, all new comments. Better comments. If you miss the old ones, well sorry but it’s weird that you’re trying to claim ownership over my thoughts and self expression. I don’t owe you or the internet a damn thing.
Would you sign up for a social media website if all the tech support posts looked like the above?
I wouldn’t sign up for a social media website if all the useful posts were from before June, 2023.
That’s why the people deleting their posts also stop posting
This. Good points above an all, but they missed this being the main point. imo
the highest value content, is mostly political anyways, its draws in more money for a platform, because users are addicted ragebait.
I hope they delete all your stuff when your account gets banned because I’ve left at least three of those in my wake
They don’t delete your content, they just redact your username and disassociate each individual comment from your larger profile so nobody could, for example, click on the deleted user who posted a comment in r/abc and see they also posted a particular comment in r/xyz.
The reason tools like Redact (many of them all use this same name lol) have taken off in popularity is because they delete, or redact the contents of your posts before you delete the account, thus making even that vestigial data worthless.
Its not guaranteed. They may keep a copy of the original post around.
In fact, anyone could
I’m fairly certain they do not
Cool they can have all my toxic hatred against Republicans for their AI to learn from
I believe they are still there but hidden.
Quite possibily it depends on the type of ban you received (e.g. spam vs inflicting harm on xyz)
I know better than to threaten people online. It was all stupid political bullshit.
That’s not really what I meant.
What I was trying to say is no ban is equal. Reddit may very well have nuance to bans they can utilize that will prevent you from just participating in comments/upvotes to full on shadow-bans.
Reddit undeleted a lot of the content removed during the API debacle. This comment must have been after that because you can see the latest comment is post API changes.
That’s why I didn’t close my account and still do a new turn of mass edits every 2-3 months. I have nothing deleted, just constantly overwritten. I get regularly banned from some subreddits after each wave, probably because some comments may trigger some sort of spam detection and edits alert the mods then.
reddit can detect if you did massedit as suspicious activity, a normal person cant change multiple comments at once, but with a script they will see it as botting.
Yup, Reddit fucked us all after we gave them our knowledge for free.
Trick people into thinking they’re contributing to a commons, steal the contributions and run. Very understandable that many people decided to retaliate after the betrayal.
I really hope decentralized knowledge bases take off. Aggregating niche knowledge from experts and non-experts everywhere the internet touches is such a valuable proposition!I had like one useful comment posted to Reddit. I’ve left it up, and once every few months I get a comment being appreciative for the info.
Reddit gets the traffic because of Google indexing the original post of a user with the problem. People are going to visit it regardless of whether they’ll find the answer or not. In fact, if they don’t find it, they’re more likely to keep browsing posts in the hope of finding something.deleted by creator
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The sad part of it is that they (reddit) can still access that deleleted information and sell it for AI training. Even as a “power” user you can use websites that “undelete” that content. The only ones truly affected by this are people randomly browsing reddit.
I mean it does reduce the value of the content that users created on reddit if a ton of random comments were deleted in protest. Every time you hit a thread like the OOP it reduces reddit 's value to the individual, and in aggregate it reduces reddits value
Did you actually read my comment? That’s an issue casual users have. If you want to see deleted comments, there’s a way to do that.
The only thing that actually hurts reddit is if people stop using it an generating new content.
Just the cost of pissing off all the highly technical users who helped build the place.
Exactly. Just used Redact myself a few weeks ago.
Thanks! Doing this tomorrow
Let it run during the night, mine took 20 hours or so to finish up. Reddit throttles the requests you make to its API, so it’s slow
I wish I’d done that. I deleted my 12 year old account right before learning about these tools.
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Explain how any of this is sus, you don’t need to be a programmer:
https://github.com/Aryanb1102/Redact-Reddit-Data-Deleter/blob/main/reddit_data_deleter.py
Ah yes because the thing that makes 140 LOC you can read and understand in five minutes trustworthy is the number of other people who clicked a star button
/s
I don’t either, but if no one ever tries github projects with zero stars how are they supposed to get stars?
Yes, because large corporations on the Internet definitely wouldn’t try to sway this metric at all, get off your own ass man fuck you
Read it then. It’s literally a single script with 140 lines.
Well, this happens if you don’t respect your users.
…or your moderators
…or your third party developers…or MY AXE!!
Fuck the mods; bunch of thin skinned morons.
Fuck the owners and resulting enshitifacation too.
now hiding history to avoid bot detection by other users, but they are banning people allegedly to be bots, but not actual propaganda bots themselves.
You get what you pay for…
I just realized this could be taken at least a couple different ways.
The way I intended was, Reddit relies fully on the free labor of volunteers for moderation.
It wasn’t intended to be a comment on not paying for Reddit. I believe all users on Reddit provide free value to the company whether by posting, commenting, or voting.
I mean some, yeah. It’s a community-run system, so naturally for every bad user, there’s a bad mod, too.
But there’s also a good mod for every good user, basically.
Good.
They went public and made bank on free user input. Those users rebelled so the platform would suck.
It may still be standing but I feel we won over a year ago.
Good
Good. Separately, I really wish we had a way to search for useful answers on Lemmy. I feel like much of the reddit was exposed through: “question/key words” site: reddit.com googling
I mean, you can do pretty much that by using one of the largest instances. That is most likely to have content from the largest amount of other instances.
Lemmy doesn’t even have a fraction of the useful information you could find on Reddit across lots of topics.
I get what you’re saying it’s just not as practical. Many won’t look for the largest/most relevant instance for their questions.
reddit is quickly making itself irrelevant.
who knew extreme censorship would be bad for the exchange of information??
This actually isn’t necessarily censorship. This is more likely users deleting their comments when moving away from Reddit to… Surprise! Lemmy.
Back during the big move people made a lot of scripts and apps to do that for them and my unpopular opinion is that its been not a good thing to do. Unless they archive their answers somewhere else it is lost knowledge. I know I am pretty alone with that view so please don’t start a discussion again, I won’t reply.
And why do a lot of leave reddit and join lemmy? For me I got tired of getting banned and having my comments deleted all the time aka censorship. I’ve nuked my comment history out of spite at least five times after bans.
Yeah, I get so pissed when people nuke their comment history. Why do that when you don’t have too much of personal revealing information in that post or comment? Even one of the mods of AskHistorians expressed frustration of insightful posts and comments being deleted by OP. I did not even delete any of my posts before I deleted my Reddit account, because there are no revealing information, and I know some of my posts and comments will be helpful for others.
fuck that, the more people nuke their comments on reddit, the faster the site becomes useless. The faster it become useless, the faster lemmy grows. So I say bombs away.
You may disagree with the net effect of the decision, but the decision is not hard to understand. The people that are doing it are placing a larger value on harming Reddit as a platform to hopefully force corrective change or encourage movement to competing platforms. You place a larger value on preserving knowledge.
You say you get pissed. My question is do you get pissed at the person who deleted it, or do you get pissed at Reddit for alienating it’s own users to the point of deleting their own comments?
I have just read other people’s comments as to why Redditors delete their comments. But even before the enshitiffication, I and others find it frustrating when comments are deleted.
I do too. But I blame Reddit for that, not the users.
censorship and being censured as well.
Don’t look at what’s been happening with the stock price.
I’m trying to get the image of spez wanking to that price graph out of my head.
When Twitter went downhill, we got bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky works as a decent Twitter replacement and Mastodon is smaller and more fediverse-focused. Lemmy and Piefed are alternatives to Reddit but I wouldnt really say that Lemmy fully replaces Reddits functionality in terms of niche subs. That’s why I’ve always been in favor of explosive growth here with each Reddit exodus, to have a forum within an order of magnitude or two of the size of Reddit to properly become a replacement.
Thanks for getting me to finally run one of these scripts to scramble and delete everything in my old account. Fuck every American corporation and their user experience.
They restored all my comments a few months later, so I’ve tried it again by editing all my comments to gibberish.
I keep checking mine, no reverse yet. Been a few months, 2 since my last purge
Exactly the tool I’ve used. I purged it about a year ago and randomly discovered that everything was restored about a month ago. I don’t know when it was restored, though.
Fuck Spez!
Awesome!!! Post your questions here instead
What kind of a boy is spez?
The fascist kind. A lot of high karma accounts got banned for no reason this last year. Destroying their own creation. Sad.
Cool it with the antifa remarks.
The anti fascist remarks?
Do you have a problem with anti fascists?
its a meme, bro get a grip
Learn to communicate please
Anything for you baby
A greedy little piggy boy
A reliable source tells me Spez likes to diddle kids and has a micropenis.
Psst hey kid he’s also a lil piss boy.
Why? so it can be found in search engines when people are looking for answers? Sadly, Lemmy is terrible for searching for answers. Lemmy will likely never replace the true benefits of reddit, search engine indexing for solutions.
Who cares about the search engines? Ask your questions here and get an answer. It just takes longer
Have you ever been on a forum? Like even once? Sort by New and you’ll find dozens of posts where the thread is shitting all over someone for asking something that has already been asked before.
We are in a forum right now dude lol.
But yeah I know how it can be you just need to find a friendly place. Like here!!
How is it possible to view deleted comments?
Redlib (alternative front-end to Reddit) puts a link to undelete for removed comments. undelete.pullpush.io
I didn’t mean to ask how one can view the comments. I meant to ask how it’s possible at all in the first place.
Iirc using the ‘delete’ button just does the equivalent of breaking the link to a picture. The data is still there.
This is why, during the mass exodus, many people were sharing scripts to edit your comments with random words before deleting them. Because deleting them leaves the content available in the database, but editing actually overwrites the data. So even if Reddit later decides to undo the deletions, (which they did), then they’ll just be a bunch of gibberish undeleted comments.
Oh right. Unless I’m mistaken, Pushshift was a data collection platform that provided an API for getting Reddit data, before the API change ruined it. When someone deletes a comment, it’s still there in the database. Pullpush is a fork.
They just added comment history hiding as well, so now you can’t even tell if some people are engaging in good faith anymore.
So I get banned for reporting trolls because it’s an “Abuse of the Report Button” AND they make it easier to Troll? Do they just want people not using the site?
@QueenHawlSera @nightlily pretty sure that you just have to consider reddit as having been very much broken for a number of years now.
They erroneously ban good users and encourage the trolls.
The only way the experience is bearable is just to block idiots yourself and not engage.I couldn’t even get them to respond to appeals, so I just deleted the fucking account
@QueenHawlSera lol. they blocked my account for having been created to evade a previous ban. Which was odd. First account there.
Figured it was some automated bollocks they’d be able to check.
Appealed, they reinstated it. Then permabanned it later same day for same reason. Gave up.Sadly that scans, apparently Reddit is one of the hardest websites to do a ban evade on because it does so many checks. If it gets the slightest whiff of something pertaining to a banned account, they ban you and increase the amount of checks they do.
Not surprised they have false positives.
I was a paying user who accidentally used an alt account a day before a ban was up.
The ban was ridiculous and unjustified but I understand alt accounts are against the rules. My appeal was rejected.
It was stupid if me to pay in the first place. My profile was linked to my real identity as result.
Like I said, I never got a rejection, they just straight up did not answer my appeal.
you cant tell if people are botting/spamming
Whoa since when can you view removed comments?
libreddit instance allows you to do that. one I’m using right now: https://discuss.whatever.social/
note that you have to kinda bounce around from instance to instance as some will be great for a couple weeks then go away or crash and then you have to find another one.
Are there any tools that can edit your comments to make the ingestion of your data into ai models less worthwhile? Eg. The comments are edited to not be random, superficially look like a human made them, but have very little value when sold by reddit
I forget the tool but every once in a while you’ll see a comment of gibberish words and it says “comment removed thanks to X”.
The service edits the comments instead of erasing them.
