Exactly. And it's so sad when I find a thread that clearly had exactly the answer I was looking for to a question, with somebody replying "thanks so much that answers it perfectly!" only the answer itself was deleted. :(

A couple years ago I came across a deleted Reddit comment[1] and I wished that I could read it so badly I messaged the op and asked him what he said. He didn't remember, and I was hoping so badly it would've been restored after I read this news. Alas, it wasn't.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/comments/eh80f...

comment source:

  I believe KitchenAid stand mixers [assembled in America](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0qKp-0h9P18), and the parts (edit: excepting the motor) do not appear to be sourced from China.\n\nHave a look around your local Ikea; a lot of their stuff, especially kitchen tools, are from Europe, Taiwan, etc, and not China. They label the source of all their stuff, so you can avoid stuff from China.\n\nZojirushi is a Japanese brand that makes all manner of appliances. Good quality. Work well. Hold up over time. Top-quality engineering.\n\nBlendtec blenders are also assembled in America. Their website casually avoid mentioning where parts are sourced, but they're at least an American firm.\n\nJapan also makes some pretty good knives, if you're in the market for those.\n\nFinally, there is always eBay. And for some appliances, such as toasters, you may in fact be able to get a better product than is available on shelves now.

Where did you find that?

I took the comment id from the url and looked it up in the pushshift data dumps.

This is why I quite like that Reddit by default just orphans comments on account deletion. One comment is usually not much of a PII danger, it's correlating them that builds up a picture. So this lets people leave their comments for others while reducing dox risk (well, unless the attacker uses Pushshift, in which case this is all futile)

If I wrote something especially noteworthy, I'll likely remember in my mind forevermore. If memory loss does occur someday, oh well. Am I going to remember to care?

The rest served its purpose at the time, but isn't something I will ever want to look back on again. What do you find so interesting in your old work?

It's not my old work I want to read, it's that of others. Comments are a frequently valuable shared annotation system for discussion on a post. Frequently I will search reddit for answers to questions I have and find a useful result in a comment.

Other times I want to get a summary of a new topic so I will find an applicable subreddit and sort by top from the last year to get an idea of what is interesting for this community.

Wherein lies the value of seeing that others read your work?

As the saying goes, work is done for those who pay for it. When I, like you, write comments on sites like these I am the one paying for it. I derive entertainment value for the cost I am sinking, so I find it to be an acceptable trade, but beyond that small window the entertainment is over and the value of what was produced is gone. To keep it around beyond that is just hoarding data.

I can appreciate that one might find value in feeling like they are helping out a greater community by allowing others to read their work. I commend those who see that value. But even that seems fleeting. If your work disappeared without you noticing, the value derived from that would not be lost. It is not the perpetual existence of the data that provides that value.

Although, I think the greater question here is: What value is there in allowing a for-profit company like Reddit to get rich selling the work you paid for?

So, you'd delete your old comments because you would rather no one in the world get any kind of value from them since you are not getting any anymore?

I wanted to delete my old posts so that Reddit doesn't get any value out of them.

That's exactly why they put in dirty hacks to defend against this.

Reddit depends on all the old content because it's indexed by search engines. People add "Reddit" when they search and then they navigate to the site. Old content brings in visitors.

>you would rather no one in the world get any kind of value from them since you are not getting any anymore?

I'd rather not get harrased from old comments in arguments I long forgotten about. Because some redditors will stalk you that persistently. I just don't want to bother to begin with.

If that cost some useful advice, I apologize. Rotten apples and all that.

I would delete comments that are past their prime like I would discard expired food in my fridge, yes. What are you going to gain from keeping something that is now rotten?

It's not about you, it's about everyone else who might benefit from reading your comment. What are you taking that benefit away from them? Why do you dislike other internet users like that?

Also comments don't rot on the internet, nothing is ever "past its prime". Why do you think comments lose value to other people? In fact, there's quite likely a long tail of future users who would benefit, who are even larger than the short tail of people in the current 24h.

This person is either really playing up their Ayn Randian philosophy or they are deluded. I think you can be somewhat relieved knowing that the comments which are deleted are probably in line with the ones made by the person today -- worthless.

Absolutely they would be worthless to others. After all, if there was value available to others, others would be willing to pay for it. And that's just not going to happen for anything I am capable of writing. There is good reason why I'm the one paying for it even though it is quite common to pay others for what they write. It is not unusual at all to pay those skilled in writing for their work. For the rest of us, it's just a hobby. And that's okay. Not all work has to be for others.

Money is just a convenient way to keep track of debt. Stop making it into some kind of proxy for all human need and utility.

I said nothing of money?

Although, of course, what you say about money is true. In fact, I can see from my not deleted HN history that I wrote that money is just an IOU only three days ago. I guess there is some value in being able to look back on my work! But is it value enough?

Human nature is to be transactional. If I offer you my time to write a comment for you, I am going to expect something in return. That in return could be nothing more than the smile you give me when you read it. It doesn't have to be some elaborate, grandiose thing, but there has to be some kind of payment or one will quickly sour to the ordeal.

If I were to write for you now, what would you give me in return? I suspect nothing because there is nothing of value I could offer you with my writing. Conversely, I offer you nothing. Will you write something for me? I expect not. Why would you?

Do you find this attitude makes your life more pleasant, or does it make it that when people at a social event find out you are on the way to join them, they sigh silently and look at the ground and make a wish that you would have gotten over your reductive, sophomoric, and joyless 'everything is a transaction' philosophy because it makes you tedious?

>does it make it that when people at a social event find out you are on the way to join them, they sigh silently and look at the ground

you're not making the best case yourself. You'd be the person coming that the host would spend half the party trying to separate from certain others becuase you'll just get into a huge fight over a bike shed and ruin the night for every.

A person on the internet deletes their comments. It's not that deep.

even if human nature is transactional, I like having a weekly tab at the bar more than putting nickels into toilet paper dispensers.

So long as I am paying for it, it is absolutely about me. I would consider offers to write for others if they see the value, but it is quite apparent that what I write does not actually provide value to others. Which is fine. I'm happy to leave that work to the professionals.

Why do you feel entitled to the work I have paid for? It is one thing if I generously offer it to you, but to expect it?

Reddit is free, you don't need to pay to write comments. You're not paying for anything. And whether future users find value is up to them to decide, not you. You can't read their minds.

And you're going out of your way to delete something you already wrote. That's extra work for you. Why do you hate the future users who might find value?

There is most definitely a cost in preparing the comments I write. I have to pay for my energy, pay for the lost opportunity, and I have to pay to recoup past investments that came together to allow me to formulate the comment. As I find entertainment in writing the comments, I am willing to pay the price, but it absolutely does not come free.

Other people don't enter the picture. There is no hate towards them, they simply don't exist in the sphere the comments are created in. It is a false premise to think that they are involved.

Then why do you post comments in the first place?

It would be easier to write them and then close the tab before hitting the button to post them. If you truly only derive value from writing them and none from anybody reading them.

And then it still "costs" you to delete them, by your logic. What is the value you get from that? If it's not from a desire to remove value for others, which you claim it isn't?

OK, so you do post them for the benefit of replies from other people. Other people who are contributing back to you. Makes sense.

I still don't understand why you delete them afterwards when that takes effort. That has a cost, and it negatively impacts others.

I post for the benefit of the silly outputs produced by their software.

It is quite possible that those outputs originate from people, but there is nothing in the service to indicate that they do come from people. They could just as easily come from a cleverly designed random number generator (think GPT). There is no real way for me to really know for sure, and it really makes no difference so long as I am sufficiently entertained by the silliness of the software outputs.

Such implementation details are well beyond my concern and not a part of the value being exchanged between me and Reddit. As they say in the world of software, "nobody cares that you used language X". While the developers writing the software may find value in "X", it makes no difference to the end user. The same applies here.

Cleaning out your fridge takes effort. I have never been happy any time I have relaxed on those efforts, though. While I am sure there is someone starving in the world that would enjoy the food about to be tossed, that does not provide sufficient reason to hoard that which is past its prime.

But a clean fridge provides benefits, because space is limited for you. And food rots.

Deleting your comments provides no benefit. Comments don't take up space of yours. And comments don't rot.

There must be a reason you're deleting comments, but it's doesn't make sense that it's because of a flawed fridge analogy.

Comments that are left to rot can continue to produce unwelcome silliness long after it is no longer entertaining. There is value in removing it from the metaphorical fridge before you have to subject yourself to the foul stench that can emit out of a comment that is past its prime.

I think you need to face the fact that you derive value from other people's comments, even if they were posted more than a day ago, yet you're depriving others of the same, leaving one-sided exchanges behind you. And that's not a fair exchange.

There's no "foul stench" of comments more than a day old, that's nonsensical.

You're obviously under no legal obligation to leave your comments up, but it's simply not playing nice with others.

I'm not going to comment here any more but I sincerely hope you're able to think about this. And take in the fact that there are actual real-life people having a conversation with you. We're not "software". And you might have a more rewarding experience online if you're able to take that in. Good luck.

Bold claim that there are people involved. We can see in the parallel thread taking place signs of an LLM-style hallucination, inventing a narrative about money where there was none before.

There very well could be people involved, but that is just an implementation detail hidden from the user. These services only present arbitrary characters of faceless and unknown origin. What lies beneath is a mystery. Which, in fairness, is a lot of the appeal. Going outside will always provide a better experience for when you want to involve other people! We come here because we want to spend some time away from other people to collect our own thoughts just for ourselves.

The foul stench is the continued silliness that persists after the entertainment is over. The design of HN is not so bad for this, but Reddit will put it right in your face if it has more to output. Once the entertainment is over, it's too much. I don't care. Silly is only entertaining for a short period of time and needs to end when that time has elapsed.

Your bot didn't pass the Turing test.

I've had some interesting discussions replying to 10+ year old comments I find in Google ever since Reddit allowed subs to opt in to replies to older threads.