Do the advantages of deleting one’s entire Reddit history outweigh the disadvantages?
I have previously nuked my first Reddit account because it felt satisfactory to be completely detached from a platform one considers unethical/bad. Though, I have garnered quite some history on a second account—because Duty Calls*, of course—and I’m considering doing the same.
However, I don’t want to do it impulsively. I think I might be blind to some disadvantages. What do you think?
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It’s too low priority in my life compared to all the real life challenges on my plate right now.
But I would want to save an html file of the entire thread and any media. Then I would host it somewhere in case anyone needed it.
I don’t care about the AI angle. I just don’t want my posts benefiting the site.
If I had tons of time, I’d edit my comments to be carefully crafted nonsense. Maybe by using a cut up machine.
Loosing vast amounts of historical posts or would I say “cultural heritage” is a shame but I couldn’t trust the party hosting it …
So with Twitter I did the same, 13 years of tweets. Even took a one month payment on a bulk erase / unlike / unfollow / unretweet service to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
Edit all your posts leaving your own message explaining why you’re removing your content. There are tools to do that that made the rounds a year ago.
The ideal scenario would be to download your data, then upload it to your own static website before deleting it.
Here’s an example of it: https://www.rareddit.com/
But you’d need a static site generator built to do that, and I haven’t been able to get a response from the person who made that website. I’ve tried posting about it elsewhere, and didn’t get any solutions.
It should be simple enough for someone to make a template or instructions or an SSG for people to use. Unfortunately, no one has.
What disadvantages? Loing fake internet points? I deleted every post and comment I had ever made, as well as my account, several years ago. It has negatively impacted my life in exactly zero ways. Look man, no offense, but you’re not erasing the works of Shakespeare over here. The world will keep on turning just fine if you delete your collection of memes and shit posts.
I changed every link in my posts, then deleted every post, replaced every comment with excerpts from literature in the public domain, then replaced the modified comments with gibberish before deleting them. Was that enough? No, but still better than allowing Reddit to profit from me without any effort. If they want my shit, they’ll have to pull from archive, and even then it might be a bit of Moby Dick.
r/redditseppuku
Deleting posts is basically pointless - reddit keeps everything you delete, it just is no longer shown to front end, regular users.
If you are concerned of your posts and comments being used to feed openai, its way too late
It still helps damage reddit’s commercialisation of users because historic posts have gaps or disappear for new users. Editing posts and replacing with gobbledygook is probably more effective.
Also, its not clear reddit is able to retain deleted posts. They have a vast live site to maintain - why would they ever have been focused on having an immutable back up of all deleted posts? They may have snapshots to restore after short term issues but it does not follow that they keep snapshots going back in time. Perhaps they do or perhaps like many companies they do the bare minimum in favour of keep costs down?
I personally think its worth using sites that edit your posts and replace with garbage, as that is harder to separate out from true edits and helps pollute the data set for AI companies.
That’s illegal within the EU.
The GDPR also gives “right to be forgotten”.
Mostly - it gets messy with content being posted though. They absolutely should be deleting all personal information about you.
I am however unsure how this applies to posts and comments which don’t contain personal information.
What’s better is to edit every comment and keep your acc active so they can’t roll it back.
I asked through support whether they keep previous versions of edited comments and posts, which they claimed that they don’t.
