Just the cost of pissing off all the highly technical users who helped build the place.
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.
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 get that it’s annoying, but reddit deserves to burn.
Reddit as a company is 100% unaffected by this
To an extent they are. Part of the appeal of Reddit was that you could find good answers there. But yeah, the idea that “long term their reputation may suffer” is hardly affecting them in any demonstrable way now.
100% unaffected? It makes their data worth a lot less for AI training. Even if they keep comment history, these are edits - how do you determine which edit to use? Using all of them poisons the data, and picking one risks doing the same.
On top of that, reddit has quickly become a non-source for opinions… I used to append “reddit” to any search where I wanted candid feedback, but absolutely would never do that these days. That’s less traffic, which is less ad money, which comprises the vast majority of their revenue. Reputation is virtually the only thing that matters for search, and Reddit’s reputation has been sliding for years.
People paying reddit aren’t training their models by scraping the web ui.
The original comments are still in the database, which is what you’d pipe into an LLM.
That’s less traffic, which is less ad money, which comprises the vast majority of their revenue.
and how many people do the same thing you do? they don’t really care about 1% of dedicated users…
…you’re joking, right? There is not a company in the world that is happy to ignore 1/100th of their revenue disappearing.
Is it going to kill reddit? Of course not. Are they “100% unaffected?” Of course not.
There is not a company in the world that is happy to ignore 1/100th of their revenue disappearing
except we are talking about USERS disappearing, not revenue. it is likely that revenue actually increased, because x+n (where n > 0) people paying more than zero generating more than zero is bigger number than x generating zero.
Reddit’s primary source of revenue is ads, that is a simple fact. What metrics do you think matter when it comes to ad revenue?
and how many ads do you think all these now gone power users were displaying and consuming? 😂
the more technical helpful users are likely to do it, you think the vast majority of users give helpful comments?
you are forgetting that reddit is not just coders and sysadmins.
people writing comments about - i don’t know - sneakers, might not care about the reddit drama at all. and all comments are helpful as AI training material - don’t succumb to the biased idea that only what interests you is important or “helpful”
Sure, but the users are.
good, but it’s not enough
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.
I really need to go back and delete all my posts, I just dropped it and never went back.
It’s a pain in the ass to do it manually. I used this script and it helped a lot.
just say something that will you get you banned and they will delete all your comments and posts and your profile. they will appear as
[deleted]. much easier tbhthey will appear as deleted, but they are not really deleted, they still have them in the database and still make money selling them 🤷♂️
would redact solve this?
make sense if reddit is a AI whore, and wants the money, what better way to have extra content from delete comments.
I had to manually delete my account when I got banned
I do wonder how much they soft delete stuff, so they can keep the data to sell. Also if they keto a history, do even if you manually delete/edit, do they have a copy on a server somewhere?
Not sure about edits, but its highly likely they still have every deleted post. Text is small and highly compressible, so there’s no reason to delete it. So it makes more sense to keep it to sell later.
Does that help the fight? I was under the impression that they got to keep all the old info
They do, but it makes the site less useable for people, which is a win
its pretty hostile to new users, since it sees a new acc as potential spam. reddits goal is to become like FB, just run by bots, but importantly propaganda bots, so less effor to deal with users.
What I did was mass edit all my comments. According to reddit customer support (about a year ago at the time), they do not retain old versions of edited comments.
You‘re harming people looking for help and support more than you harm Reddit.
And Reddit took people’s goodwill to give free advice their and generate revenue from it for granted.
Which harms Reddit more than anything, as people will look elsewhere.
Reddit already only allows Google to scrape them now, so as far as I am concerned it is a dead site. Removing my comments is worth it to not feed the monopoly that is Google.
50% of the site is basically bots/propaganda bots. people dont realize they are responding to bots most of the time.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
What a spezhole
Well said, I fully support it. Let’s hope at least this place doesn’t turn into 1984 like others.
Thanks, SPEZ!
Fuck that pedophile wannabe.
Don’t forget racist, too!
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.
Yeah… I did this too when leaving. Made a small app to edit and delete every comment I made. I actually had a useful IT related self hosting post which was also nuked. I guess that’s the price the whole community had to pay for reddits thirst for profit.
Although, long ago, I heard of a rumor; all of reddit was frequently backed up and available for download. Is that still a thing? Was it ever a thing?
Can you post your app on GitHub? Many of us would love it. (Especially now if I ever need to visit the US I would have to delete all my JD Vance couch fucker comments)
Someone in this thread posted a similar thing that’s probably better. When I left, there wasn’t anything like it so I had to cobble something together.
I heard of a rumor; all of reddit was frequently backed up and available for download
I don’t know about “available for download” (probably not), but: modern websites tend to have their content stored in a database, and databases are (or should be) regularly backed up to tape drive or optical disks or whatever. This means, fundamentally, that everything ever posted to a social media site like reddit or facebook will be in existence permanently, regardless of what efforts users take to subsequently delete their history from the current instance of the database.
The only way to truly “delete your data” would be to re-mount each old backup and delete the data in each of them before re-backing them up (or else destroying all the backups). No social media site does this or even could do this. Furthermore, when it comes to keeping your comment history out of the clutches of AI, I would almost guarantee that when a site like reddit sells its data to companies to train the AI on, they are selling old backups from before users started mass-deleting their posts.
There was pushshift, but it’s locked down since the API thing, there’s pullpush.io, but that seems down atm. Also there is reveddit. I think most or all of these do not store content that has been deleted by the user though.
WTF? View removed comment?
Welcome to “soft delete”, where database entries are marked with a “deleted” flag instead of being actually deleted. Makes it trivial to restore things a user has “deleted”. Actually, even without soft deletes, modern databases maintain an audit trail which tracks all changes made anywhere, which also makes it easy to restore “deleted” items. And actually actually, databases are regularly backed up and when a user “deletes” their data the sites don’t go into the backups and delete the data there, so everything anyone posts is technically in existence forever (not really because because backups won’t last forever but they can last a very long time).
I’m sure that when reddit sells its data to companies to train their AI on, they’re selling backups from before users started mass-deleting their histories.
It’s for alternate Reddit front-ends and rarely ever works.
This must be new.
I made sure to remove all my posts before i left when they started blocking anonymous vpn users. 3 accounts across 15+ years all gone because of their stupid policies.
I love that people are removing the solutions, but keeping the “holy shit you just saved me 2-3 full quarters of work”
That’s because the person who had the solution removed their comment history, but the person who said thank you didn’t.
is this alt text
Awesome!!! Post your questions here instead
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!!
