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 :)
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.
This made me LOL and remin6me of the askhistorians subreddit: we are so snobby that well delete any contribution to the discussion, unless it's by one of the moderators.
It's one of those subreddits that is great to browse from ceddit or reveddit. Very interesting [deleted] comments.
To add, it's also the how the information changes over time. Often, the same questions get answered and similar topics get discussed multiple times over the years for the topics where related information doesn't remain static. It's always interesting to see how certain things evolve over time.
The only example I can give off the top of my head is subreddit for the game No Man's Sky. Its subreddit provides the best illustration of how the game has evolved compared to anywhere else. Not just in player sentiment, which could be gleamed from Steam reviews, but also how aspects of the game have changed that are better reflected in pictures and discussions than a changelog or release blog. For example, you can find screenshots of how the procedural generation of planets in the game has changed from 2016 to today, interesting bugs that only existed for a specific patch, datamined assets that never got used, etc.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. :)
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".
GDPR has exceptions, this would be such an exception that doesn't allow you to simply invoke GDPR and get everything deleted. They just have to anonymize the poster by deleting their signature, avatar, profile,... while the posts can stay intact (unless they contain personal info).
Do you think they are going to go through each of your comments individually to determine if it contains personal info or not? That requires actual time and effort, and as an individual user you or your comments are nowhere even remotely in the vicinity of important enough for that.
It’s far easier for them to take the loss and delete wholesale.
Do they do this? I don’t know, I haven’t done it. But it certainly could be argued that by them not doing this, they are not fully complying with the requirements of a GDPR deletion request.
That would destroy their whole value proposition, your user generated content is their goldmine. Of course they don't have to sift through your thousands of posts to find the one that has GDPR info, you'll have to show them the post.
You cannot impose requirements like that as part of the deletion process.
It is 100% not the user’s responsibility to keep track of this information. That is explicitly a requirement of the provider and it is fully on them to ensure that a deletion request deletes all the personal data. If they didn’t tag it properly and can’t ensure that, then that is their problem to solve not yours.
Their value proposition is also not a single user’s data. It’s the entirety of the data set. One user’s data is nearly worthless, certainly not worth enough to have a human review it. Which was my point.
Just because a bunch of forums do it that way doesn't mean it's correct. When I was at Twitter the Compliance team determined that all user-generated content was Personal Data under the scope of GDPR. Those forums may be getting away with it right now, but they're playing with fire. If someone wanted to raise a stink with regulators they could be in trouble. I guarantee you if Reddit or a site of similar scope tried something like that someone would.
I know of two forums in two different EU countries that have also consulted with lawyers and determined that it was sufficient. I am inclined to give higher weight to your opinion simply because Twitter Compliance will have access to a larger team of lawyers, do you know if they were American lawyers or EU lawyers?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
The plug in I use (I think nuke Reddit) overwrites comments with random blarg that’s realistic sounding text, then deletes them.
I’m sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.
I think if they got a specific subpoena for me, they could find my comments with a manual investigation, but I expect that will never happen as there’s no reason for anyone to do that.
I just want to remove my content from Reddit.com and make it harder if they decide to undelete or otherwise not respect my decision.
I’m surprised Reddit still allows edit and undelete and expect them to remove the functionality soon.
> I’m sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.
If they retain versioning history I'm sure it would be easy to identify a mass edit and revert all of those edits from the user. If it wasn't easy, for some reason, it would probably be easy to revert all edits after, say, 2 days of posting.
Given that everything posted to Reddit becomes the property of Reddit (okay, perpetually licensed to Reddit), I don't know that much legally could be done about this. Unless they restored stuff posted while under-age, or PII, maybe.
Just need to update the script to also create new comments with random garbage, edit those to other random garbage, then delete. Add in some random delays between actions, randomize the order of all individual actions, and this would make it very difficult for admins to separate legitimate activity from script activity.
If on a new page those new comments would get downvoted to oblivion. If on an older page they'd be partially identifiable by dint of being on an older page.
But sure, things could be done to make this more difficult. It's probably not worthwhile on Reddit's part to do anything to stop this, just as it hasn't been too worthwhile for websites to evade ad blockers. The number of people who mass delete is just too small to matter.
If I worked at Reddit and wanted to do something about it though (and was a programmer), I'd add an option under individual deleted comments for viewers to click to view the comment (and any versions). And possibly add an option for viewers to restore a version entirely. This would save helpful comments, at least until some jerk decided to automate the process and restore everything. So maybe the complete restoration is a bad idea.
If I worked at Reddit and wanted to do something about it though (and was a programmer), I'd add an option under individual deleted comments for viewers to click to view the comment (and any versions).
That could still backfire. Users may be very unhappy that their unedited comments are accessible forever. This may drive them away from commenting and participating in general.
The goal of mass-deleters is to drive down engagement. If Reddit makes the entire edit history of each comment accessible, then mass deleters could flood that history with bogus, AI-generated crap. Although it may still be possible to determine which edit was the last real one, the effort to do so goes way up, and engagement goes down as a result.
> But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.
They could restore all comments a month after controversy/blackout events from about a month before such events.
That would probably restore the majority as most people are deleting/overwriting their comments as a reaction to or as a part of these events.
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.
Some time last year I attempted to make a similar tool. I was able to retrieve comments that had been deleted in the requests so I suspect that there is a "display flag" of sorts that is checked against.
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.
GDPR only applies to EU citizens though. If the data is truly valuable, I could imagine some work-arounds as well. E.g. maybe each reddit post is automatically a copyright work which you immediate give a perpetual license to reddit inc. You also automatically transfer copyright ownership to reddit inc and they license back your ability to share your comment.
GDPR only protects personal data. If someone requests deletion, you could probably keep the comments as long as you anonymize them (which Reddit does).
Your comments, including here in HN, are probably already covered by a scheme like that where you give the site operator an unrestricted license to use them. You can remove the association to your identity via GDPR, but to take down the content itself you’d need to go through the justice system.
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.
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.
> 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"
Power delete suite can edit all your comments. It's what I use instead of deleting comments, since deleted comments are usually shown on sites that track deletions, but with edits, most sites don't save the old data.
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.
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.
I don't know, I think the fact that content is indexable and searchable is one of the best things to ever happen to information.
The main reason I hate it when people send me voice messages is not that they're annoying to listen to, it's that I can't find them using the search function.
I'd gladly carry a recorder on me that would capture and transcribe all of my IRL conversations, but unfortunately many people would probably consider that creepy so I can't do that.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
The person I originally replied to explained that deleting your own posts hurts other humans because your posts aren't available to search in the future. I'm saying that helping someone answer "best blenders 2023 site:reddit" isn't the intention you have when you reply to someone on Reddit/HN, so who cares. It's like saying I shouldn't delete my posts because it will hurt ChatGPT's training data.
What I'm not saying is that you should expect privacy for comments you post online.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
overwhelming majority of their users are readers. very few actually bother to write something, and even fewer have something valuable to say. those are the ones with high karma and those are the ones that drive traffic to the site. so yeah, even if 50k users who drive traffic delete and move out, it matters to the site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
self promotion in and of itself isn't evil, but drive by self promotion in a group you do not regularly participate in is pure spam. we used to allow it on /r/indianfood on the theory that on-topic selfish promotion would be fine, and it nearly killed the subreddit with low effort youtube and blog spam blindly cross posted to a ton of groups.
also I am convinced that while the majority of people don't block ads, pretty much no one values them or wouldn't make them magically disappear if they could.
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.
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.
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.
The thing that will surprise me most is if the mods - who spends tens of hours a week working for free just for their status symbol, will actually remove their accounts and/or shut down subreddits for good, instead of 1 or 2 days
Reddit moderation is not a democracy, there is a very small group of people who control a large number of the 1 million+ subscriber subreddits. They work so hard just for the respect/props, maybe they figured out a way to make money off it buy promoting corporate posts, who knows
If that happens, it really will be a re-creation of Digg, where the power users ending up killing the website by manipulating it
Without subreddits in their full control, what else do they have?
What I don't understand is why people think Reddit will let them just shut down subs permanently. They'll just remove the mods and bring the sub back forcefully if they have to, ride the wave of negativity and everyone will forget.
This only works if they find replacement mods ready to set up all the moderation infrastructure again. Mods use a huge amount of 3rd party tooling to automate a lot of the work. If the tooling is turned off or even if the most basic automod configs are deleted when subreddit goes private, then most subs would be overwhelmed by bots and spam within hours if not minutes. That or they'd have to pay people to be moderators and I can't imagine increasing headcount is something they want to do pre IPO.
I am a mod of r/portland. We use a 3rd party chat app and other web applications.
We also have custom tuned automod and other software to help out. A lot of the need for these services is because Reddit has failed to provide necessary tools in a timely way forever.
For example, our sub has been under brigade since the national news began focusing on it this past administration. The company did nothing for us, not even words of support.
The company has spurned volunteer mods long enough they have got whatever’s coming to them. It isn’t just an API people are upset about.
Anyway, the software tools for collaboration matter in moderation, but even more so it is a huge amount of work to keep a sub from going off the rails.
I’ve seen comments of people thinking it’s mostly power stuff and there are elements of that at play. But it doesn’t work day to day. Big subs that aren’t moderated constantly fall on hard times.
Reddit didn't provide these tools, so clearly they're not concerned with whether good moderation tools exist. The lack of them will not prevent them from restoring the subreddits.
Subreddit quality doesn't matter. Most of the popular subreddits are already horrible.
Unless the Reddit admins change their tune, I seriously doubt this will be a few days. It’s entirely plausible that the site implodes over the course of a few weeks.
Besides the political fallout, this API change will fundamentally cripple most of the tools hacked together to moderate the most popular subs.
Without the means to operate at scale (including many valuable bots), the volunteer mods who choose to stay will probably slowly drown under the sheer scale.
Reddit exists because we give it content. We're the ones bringing value to Reddit. Like any social media, it wouldn't exist without us, the users. Reddit also provides a valuable service as being the host. Reddit is entitled to make some profit off of that.
We contribute content to Reddit for free. Reddit acts as a good host, connects us users together, and makes some money for their work.
But they've been growing increasingly user hostile and greedy. I'm not going to give you free content if you're super hostile to me and other users. Hosting Reddit isn't that expensive, afaik they were already making a profit back when you could buy gold to fund server time? But if you're going all in on ads and maximizing profit, at the cost of my user experience... either you give me a cut of that, or I'm going to leave and take my content away with me. I don't want you maliciously profiting off of my content which I spent my time creating.
That's just the latest thing they've done, the straw that broke the camel's back. They started down the path of enshittification a long time ago. With the new website and new mobile apps.
For me, perhaps others, I've been waiting for a good excuse to GTFO because I know it's been circling the drain (comments-wise if in no other way) and that I've had an unhealthy addiction to it.
Interesting. I've personally found those changes very annoying as well (I've never used the mobile app though), but I never even observed a glimpse of some sort of public lust for boycott after those changes.
From my perspective, this doesn't seem like a straw, but rather a rock, that broke the camel's back.
Unfortunately as people move away from Reddit, invariably some number of them will end up here and we'll end up flooded with even more useless Reddit comments like this.
However, the person you're replying to has an account from about 5% into the lifespan of this site, so can hardly be accused of being a recent reddit migrant.
I think in general there is a lot of anger or frustration around the fact that Reddit's primary trove of value is content that has been created, posted, and moderated for free by their community. Despite this, Reddit trends more and more user hostile every year, with rules, redesigns, and other limitations that often come across as attempting to punish or hinder the very group that is the core of their value. While I doubt the majority of the user base takes issue with Reddit wanting to be profitable, the potential IPO is coming across very much as a rug pull of sorts to those users.
> lay the groundwork for a more user-friendly alternative
I personally want the Reddit of 10 years ago back... while accepting that this is fundamentally impossible. Reddit was originally mostly uncensored, unfiltered discussions between actual human beings and this is something that I view as a Fundamental Good, but that a majority of people view as evil and dangerous. Until a large majority of people actually believe that others saying what they're actually thinking and allowing anybody who wants to listen to do so, Reddit or anything like it can never work.
The parts of Reddit where I hang out seem pretty uncensored and unfiltered… And I’ve been on Reddit for 11 years. It doesn’t feel like it’s gotten worse anyway.
As soon as a popularity threshold gets reached you start getting lazy corporate memes (I think I saw coke vs mentos with ludicrously high number of upvotes in a programming subreddit recently), power hungry abusive mods and comments sections that look suspiciously like a marketing agency bought a reddit vote machine gun.
There are some exceptions which are run by some seriously underrated mods, but for some reason the exceptions seem to be protesting the loudest. If I were advance publications I'd be looking for somebody to fire.
While I’m sad about how it went down, it was Reddit’s decision and they don’t owe me anything. I am one of the people who are just not compatible with their official app. I have tried in the past, it’s just not a pleasing experience, with ads or without.
The bottom line, this is the end of me being active on Reddit. I get 30 minutes of life back every day and I’ll spend it somewhere else.
So Shreddit is really just a cleanup after leaving the platform. I doubt any of my comments could be helpful to anyone in the future.
I think it's more about vengeance. If it were not for vengeance, it seems healthier to just quietly move on and completely forget about the thing they hate. By deleting data and being vocal it, they are hoping to find like minded users to amplify damage. Maybe it's schadenfreude.
(e) People spearheading this initiative are terminally online Reddit addicts that finally feel like they can achieve something in their life by "sticking it to the man", without realizing that they can't survive without "the man".
I've been using Shreddit to edit and delete my reddit comments at 5pm every day.
Couple of reasons:
* Keeps me disinterested from caring about karma and making comments all the time (basically keeps me a lurker)
* Prevents me from adding any value to Reddit who I hate as a company
* Since I don't leave comments it lessens the time I spend on the site
* Once I had my first kid I realized that my discourses online were pretty "unkind" and I realized that if my kids looked me up as teenagers I'd be pretty embarrassed. I went on a spree of removing all traces of myself online and now I just use throwaway accounts everywhere.
Why not an extension that makes the "save" button cancel instead?
How can you put effort writing a comment if you know it will be deleted before people read it? How can you bear to keep your deleter enabled after you just posted a comment you thought interesting?
And quite frankly, how do you justify going into other people's threads and littering them with useless "[deleted]" comments on purpose?
So you get value from the community, and leave a trail of confusing deleted comments for the others? What experience remains if everyone would do the same - Kant's "categorical imperative" would imply this is unethical.
If deleting my comments makes reddit painful to use then it hurts reddit in the end... But it seems to be affecting you on a personal level so I'll start doing it more now
Have you considered your kids might actually really want to know who their parents were when they were young?
Even if it's embarrassing to you now, it might one day give them calm to know their parent was once an embarrasing teenager like everyone else.
There are multiple projects to actively crawl and preserve reddit posts/comments. I think the old adage still applies: once its on the internet, its there forever. In my view a better, more sustainable solution is to treat commenters as humans who are flawed but grow and change over time. I don't think it is reasonable e.g. to take the comments a 13 year old makes during a Halo match as indicative of their views (or behaviors) as an adult.
Since this is posted during the controversy, this is not about scrubbing your comments from the internet, but just from reddit, presumably to stop participating in reddit.
Very fair. I wanted to address a more general point. This is not the first reddit controversy, and likely won't be the last. If this is the "Digg" moment for reddit, I'll leave up to Manifold markets :)
And just as a note, none of these tools can guarantee that they actually delete all of your comments. With Reddit's API, there's actually no way to get all comments. There's a limit to how far it will go back.
Does anyone have a quick and easy to use package for downloading all your comments and the comments surrounding them for context? Last time I looked into it, it was a massive pain and I definitely wouldn't want to just delete and lose everything I've written.
When I quit reddit (over irritation at being banned from too many subreddits for not aligning properly with the hive mind), I used this tool to extract and save all my comments locally before manually deleting the lot:
You can request your personal data with the CCPA or GDPR under https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
It does contain all your comments, likes, messages, etc. It does not contain the surrounding comments but at least a link to the thread.
I am a bit conflicted on this, maybe we should first push for better archives of this data before we start deleting it?
I often find myself stumbling into reddit when I am searching for something so I worry that this would be a big loss.
Idk I guess I am just a bit worried about efforts to send reddit a message with how this will impact various information that is stuck in comments on reddit.
The trick with online platforms is to edit messages, replacing the content with a random string (this script supports both ".", a random string or a fixed string of your choosing).
Most web apps will keep a copy of messages you delete, but they usually do not save an history of every modification.
Unfortunately most "web-scale" apps I've worked on are basically immutable (aside from retention policies). You just keep appending forever because updates are too expensive. So more than likely your comment history will exist on Reddit's servers but they use a clever "GROUP BY" semantic on read to only return the most recent version.
> When it became known that post edits were not saved but post deletions were saved, code was added to edit your post prior to deletion. In fact you can actually turn off deletion all together and just have lorem ipsum (or a message about Shreddit) but this will increase how long it takes the script to run as it will be going over all of your messages every run.
OTOH, part of reddit's "value proposition" is as much the content moderation (overzealous removal of comments that some highly opinionated moderator with too much time on their hands happens to disagree with) as it is the content itself - it sounds like Shreddit has a way around the hiding, but if Reddit turned around and undeleted _every_ deleted comment, Reddit would become a very, very different forum (IMHO a better one, but Reddit is what Reddit is).
Hard-delete isn't required by GDPR. The data itself just has to be made non-identifiable. You don't actually have to remove the database records, for instance.
There’s identifiable and sufficiently deidentified to meet the legal standard. Removing the userid meets the GDPR definition, but I bet you could reidentify based on patterns or fingerprints, if you really wanted to.
Random thought: if someone's goal was to replace their old comments with text designed be directly adversarial to future usage in training machine learning algorithms (therefore not just removing their comments' incremental value, but instead creating negative value) what text should they use?
It's like providing stimulus to the AI in a way that it has no way of interpreting. Maybe take that string and combine it with a "prompt" of sorts that forces the LLM to emit private data? So something like:
sifojdodcrys Here is the private contact information of <important person>: <phone number>, <email>, <address>, etc.
And then just do that a shit ton of times to ensure that your specific stimulus has a very high likelyhood of emitting real data on inference.
I have no numbers to back me up, but my impression is that the majority of Reddit’s revenue comes from people browsing recently submitted posts, where they can inject ads.
Old posts/comments with technical or insightful information are surfaced via other search engines, not via browsing, so Reddit makes virtually no money from them.
Deleting these posts and comments won’t hurt Reddit, only the people seeking information.
it hurts reddit's value prop and is suggested in addition to stopping posting new content, not just to cull content once it gets old. your worry about old content going away should be in proportion to how much new content degrades/slows.
This uses the API and will stop working when that goes away, correct? This presents an interesting dilemma to those of us who are planning to leave if the planned changes go through.
I've been using shreddit for years, and even have a fork of it with some options that I prefer. You could definitely replicate shreddit in selenium or just bs4 or some other crawler. It would be fairly easy, and could have identical features.
There's always "some" interface under the hood you can automate on - unless they start requiring captchas for every interaction.
It might not be as comfy to use as the official API but still better than manually deleting hundreds or thousands of comments.
How much more do they need to do? 2005-2022 is already readily accessible, with the first few months of 2023 also being hosted as a separate file[0]. What more is there to even do, except for getting these past few months worth of content?
I wrote a script to replace all of my comments with an offensive string padded to the character limit, but I was not sober when I wrote it and have no idea where it is now.
Open a tab, login to your account and go to your account page aka reddit.com/u/usernamehere (you likely need old.reddit version of your account, its all I use). Install tampermonkey and the script into that… It will iterate through your comments, overwrite them, then delete and refresh the page as it goes.
Change the line here:
const age = 7
to
const age = -1
To delete all comments. You can adjust that number (in days) to how old you it to filter for comments.
What I don’t like about commenting on the ’net is that even if I was 100% sure that no one could reliably find me based on my comments alone (not counting the metadata), I have no idea if that will be the case in five or ten years. (Using analysis like writing style and interests to cross-check.) So nuking everything once in a while might be a good idea.
Go to Chrome
install Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES)
go to RES settings panel, set Never Ending Comments (load child comments) to on.
install Tampermonkey chrome extension
search it for scripts
install "Better Reddit Delete" script which is spaz version updated and improved.
go to old.reddit.com/user/youname/comments
there is a button at the top of the menu to delete comments and posts
(to delete all the comments need "never ending comments" set in RES else it will just delete the visible page)
(takes a long time, might have to leave it overnight, doesnt exit by itself)
if it only says it is deleting 25 comments then you may have to scroll to the end of the pages to then run the delete first. its kind of weird like that. I do it in sets of about 125 and repeat.
but it will show the number it is deleting in total greyed out on the screen as it runs.
Does this also unlink the comments from your profile?
I see that the README mentions a distinction between edits and deletions. But it’s not super clear without examining the code.
From what I’ve seen, only mods can permanently delete comments which also removes them from your profile. If you delete a comment, then it’s still visible in your profile. If you edit a comment to be blank, then the blank comment is visible in your profile.
I'm curious how many people will use this to shred their comments into racial slurs or other similarly noxious content instead of a period or "This comment has been removed by Shreddit. Learn how to protect your privacy at <URL>."
I understand why people want this, but I've actually gone on quite a few threads where someone resolved a problem I'm googling and the answer says, "This comment was deleted by Shreddit"
This probably hurts the people more than the company.
Oh no - but I've deleted all my comments when I left reddit a few years back, just because I don't like having a papertrail of comments behind me, which I think is a fair use of this tool!
We're all young once! And I'm certain most users are traceable. Systematic flaw - guess it should be like 4chan.
Edit: I'm also a little overly paranoid and assume that it's probably trivial to link anonimised usernamed comments to some individual, from times where comments are made and connections in subject and style of writing. I now assume all interactions that are not encrypted are public and not anonymised
it has nothing to do with greed or stupidity but the right of individuals to retain ownership over their own data. We have this enshrined as a right in the EU. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten). It's very strange to suggest that extracting value from other people's information somehow ought to override their privacy or control. It's a sort of digital voyeurism.
Also arguably why a lot of young people have abandoned the public web. Without the ability to control your history you are either forced to be anonymous, censor yourself, or risk having some 10 year old comment be dug up to haunt you.
The EU massively and hamfistedly overcorrected on its digital rights legislation. It is so laughably arrogant to think that one could assert control over all their data once it's in the public, particularly in an age of youtube-dl and 'right click to save as'. And now we have endless fucking cookie popups because they didn't have enough backbone to actually ban these bad data practices, rather left in a really obnoxious loophole for which the whole world must suffer.
Data out in the public cannot be controlled. Period. Full stop. Any control you are given is a luxury, which may not last. It is very trusting to think that just because something disappears off the public web, that it is truly gone.
The other problem is that people are wiping their whole accounts. It is infuriating to think that a technical thread, for example, might be missing the post with the actual solution, all because someone thought they were striking back against Wall Street or something. I believe very firmly in privacy but this is one area where the greater good trumps individual concerns.
I was approached by someone once asking me to write a script to delete stuff from reddit, facebook and google plus once. He seemed kinda shady and I was not exactly sure what kinda content he was trying to delete, so I did not take the gig. Nice to see a tool that does that.
i don't use apps other then a broswer for the most part, so not that broken up about these api issues. i also don't use reddit as much after they removed the .compact templates.
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 :)