A screenshot, taken way before rexxit, of two comments on reddit, dated “1 year ago”.
The first comment is by a deleted user and the comment has been removed. The second comment is a reply to the deleted comment and it says: “That solved it. Thanks!”
Edit: added temporal context.
This is why I’m not deleting my reddit posts and comments. It’s not worth making the whole world a tiny bit worse just to punish one company.
I respect that, and if Reddit had handled the situation differently, I’d be inclined to agree. But I just do not want them profiting off of my contributions when they’ve shown such utter contempt for their user base and moderators.
Why does one single corporation get sole ownership of your knowledge?
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post elsewhere.
Your knowledge belongs to you, you have the right to take it with you when you leave.
Of course you have the right to be lazy and not do that. Or to say, “I am fine with leaving it for Reddit to sell”.
But please don’t attempt to belittle or minimize the efforts of those who are trying to make a stand.
You are acting like they are doing something wrong (“making the world smaller”) when they are simply deciding that their knowledge will not be monetized by a corporation.
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post elsewhere.
If you believe that what you’ve learned is of value you have to both consider what you’re saying and who can see it. If it’s valuable Reddit is far more discoverable than a corner of the internet. It’s not a matter necessarily of being “lazy”, it’s weighing the medium with the message.
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post somewhere.
It’s not easy either. Reddit sometimes has a particular set of posts that solve queries that are not even answered in stack overflow.
Reddit may have did a massive asshole move, but deleting those things might make things difficult only for people who seek the knowledge, not reddit.
Is ensuring an information monopoly for an unethical, profit-above-else driven corporation making the world better?
Saving the important posts, posting the question and answer to lemmy and then deleting those posts imo would be the most optimal solution. At least the information is available somewhere and not punishing people looking for answers to their queries.
Are Lemmy posts discoverable from normal search engines? If not, then it’s about as useful as the information posted in some obscure Discord chat
If Lemmy becomes the go-to place where the knowledge resides, “regular” search engines will adapt to index communities across the instances.
Na, they need to be punished and by extension the world can hate Reddit over it.
Also there is that website that lets you see deleted content.
Export your Reddit posts and comments, repost them on another platform like Lemmy then delete everything.
Keeping your data on Reddit makes it still worth using and help them.
Exactly, it’s like people burning the library of Alexandria again. And in some cases it doesnt stop traffic. The post with question will often stay. Just removing something because you don’t like someone’s actions… Sounds just like u/spez. And so they’ve become the thing they vowed to destroy.
Devil’s advocate. There’s no such thing as an effective protest that doesn’t inconvenience the public. I’ve heard people say the exact same thing about the blackouts. This protest would not have worked if people could use Reddit normally and totally ignore what was going on. Unlike most protests, none of this does any harm to people IRL so I think people should be OK with being heavy-handed. It’s “oh no, I can’t access reddit to help figure out how to fix my wifi” vs “protests are blocking me on my way to work, causing me to be late and possibly be fired”. The situations just don’t compare.
Beyond that, Reddit has replaced all forums and discussion boards and it’s actually a huge problem in terms of being a single point of failure. It’s a net positive that this issue was highlighted for the non-tech crowd.
Except, it’s not like burning the Library of Alexandria again, because you can find most of those old posts on The Internet Archive. Hell, if you’re too lazy to go search the URL, there are browser extensions that will do it for you.
I never posted anything worth preserving over there so my choice was clear lel
lel
Fuck have we really gone that far back? We’ll be back to saying kek before too long at this rate
roflmao!
I’ve never seen that before and I thank you for correcting that. <3
…least I got chicken!
As much as reddit sucks right now, getting rid of decades of tech solutions that are not found anywhere else (not on the fediverse either) is not a solution. back up your reddit stuff somewhere and link to it from reddit, but don’t delete it, and don’t delete it and tell people ‘because lemmy’, people will hate lemmy.
Instead of “because lemmy”, I’d say reddit now charges money for the content, but they did not pay the creator.
That’s a problem with many companies… for example, Google Maps relies almost completely on its local guides that spend many hours of their free time adding content to google maps. Google makes money with ads, but in my >5 years of being a local guide, I only got a 15% discount for Google store as reward (after being a local guide for 4 years) which I don’t even need…
I don’t mean to brag, but I was a very active Guide for a couple years and I am still in the top 10% even though I haven’t posted a review in two years. My profile info shows that I have had hundreds of thousands of views.
They gave me a pair of Google Guide themed socks. They were cheap, poorly sized, and wore thin quickly.
It’s infuriating, and even more when you start looking for that profit pattern in companies that range from “philanthropic” foundations leeching from volunteers while buying their own companies stock, to academic journals with CEO’s earning ridiculous amounts of money over research that someone else paid.
Use “Because API changes” instead of “Because lemmy”. But I agree; changing it to a link to Lemmy instead is better. Theres a shit-ton of valuable information buried on Reddit.
Honestly, those decades of solutions are useless unless they have both a version number and a date associated with them. And if that date is more that 6 months ago, it’s probably still useless even if it has both.
I posted a reply with a “quick fix” to a Lenovo T14s issue, quite some time ago. That reply has kept getting “Thank you” replies now and again. I suspect that that will continue for a long time to come.
There is a lot of that kind of useful information on Reddit that doesn’t get outdated for at foreseeable future.
Hell. I found a 14 year old solution to a Borland database issue I had at work, buried in some old forums, so don’t dismis the value of old information.
You say that, but when your employer is still running Windows Server 2012, you’ll find a lot of 10-year-old solutions to problems are still very much applicable.
Even beyond that, there are a lot of new versions of things that are still built on legacy software. Some things change but some things just remain the same for a long time.
This is why maintaining your account there and keep deleting your comments/posts will destroy Reddit. Do it, you have the power.
I destroyed thirteen years of comment and post history. Is there any reason I should further maintain my account? I’m asking because if there’s something more I can do to screw with their site via my account, I’m all ears.
Make sure your posts are deleted, and sell it to an advertiser. Just look up where to sell. A 13 Year old account will make you a good bit of money, and it will in all likelihood be used to spam the site with an ad campaign.
Man on one hand that would feel cathartic as fuck, and who would mind a bit of extra money, but I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.
I still feel a bit ambivalent about deleting comments in general, like yes it hurts the company, but it also hurts innocent users just looking for answers.
weird to say but once i found a answer for a problem in reddit that wasn’t solved/asked even in stack overflow.
Once? Happened all the time for me
yes but at the same time – isn’t this worse for us, the users, as a whole losing bits of information like this? the fucks up top do not give a shit about any of this
Yes, but it forces all of us to look for and construct a better alternative that’s not tied to the whims of the tyrants that runs corporations.
This has been a meme for such a long ass time (even before Reddit) that any deleted post in a support type thread (or on a meme of the subject) was subject to someone replying “Thanks that solved it!”
The most common version of this is when someone posts to Stack Overflow asking about the exact problem in having.
The only reply is from OP: NVM. Fixed it. (4 years ago.)
And you can never post the same topic again since it’ll be marked as duplicate and links back to that useless-ass post
This has "searching desperately for a programming question only to find a stackexchange that’s like “edit: nevermind I solved it” energy.
Nothing grinds my gears more than looking for a tech solution / coding solution to a problem, only to find one other person had the same issue, and then finding that the original post was either deleted like in OPs, or just “nevermind I fixed it”.
Who were you DenverCoder9? What did you see?!
This thread is great. I love how people are arguing against deleting your Reddit history by comparing their own history to the content in the Library of Alexandria. The Reddit hive mind and subreddit echo chamber had a lasting effect, it seems.
That’s the intention of users deleting their staffs: making reddit less useful, and therefore, shrink its traffic.
That’s the downside of having a website completely runned by the community and volunteer moderators. You mess with them, you lose half of their contents. 🤣
People are acting like reddit is the library of Congress.
Answers to tech problems aren’t what drive reddits profits. They make way more in daily posts and memes. Deleting helpful comments hurts users way more than reddit.
I disagree. So many people used Google and Reddit congruently as a sort of “hack” for finding solutions quickly, not just tech based but for any and everything. Google even announced that their search has worsened since the reddit changes. For it to be noticeable by Google and enough the publicly comment on it, I’d say it was driving alot more traffic to reddit than your thinking. It also brought in non daily active users to the site, potentially turning them into daily active users.
Tldr, if this was hurting Google enough to notice, reddit is definitely feeling the pain. 😁
I fix a LOT of random things for myself and as a side hustle. Google is sometimes good for that sort of thing but but adding “reddit” into the search field generally yields far better results.
There’s every chance that’s Reddit’s fault and the comment with the answer was deleted within the last month as part of a “burn it down on the way out” protest. If you’re coming from a Google search, it may be annoying, but if you’re posting here about it, you can probably imagine why it was deleted.
I mass edited all of my Reddit comments to say “Deleted” along with a message that I do not want Reddit profiting from my content when they treat their community so poorly. I felt that was more constructive than simply deleting the comments (and risk the admins restoring it if I were to delete my account entirely).
Prior to the shitstorm, I was active in many communities and provided lots of answers to technical topics; those answers are now lost outside of any post archives out there.
Just fyi, I took this screenshot a year ago. This was very common for years already.
I saw a few people editing all their Reddit comments/posts with an explanation as to why the info is gone and they also gave a link to where they could find their content reposted on Lemmy. Thought that was pretty clever.
Of course it’s not just deleted, it’s removed by moderators.
Typical Reddit.
I’m really torn by this. Should all this data be preserved for the betterment of society, or is that what Reddit should get for killing their goose that laid golden eggs…
Mass deleting comments is something that just makes us feel better. Reddit still profited off the post with people clicking on it. They just see a deleted message instead of an answer.