I installed the official Reddit app and went on it to see what the old place was looking like now. My inbox was filled with spam. The “home feed” shows subs I never subscribed to. There are so many ads. Between the ads and the the extra subs in the feed, it’s hard to just scroll. I also noted a lot of spam in some of the subs. Maybe they are subs with no mods? I’m not sure what’s up with that.
They’re your comments and I understand the sentiment, but I do wish people didn’t delete their Reddit comments. Preserving what’s there will help people who look in the future - we just don’t have to add to it, and can (and should) devote our energies elsewhere.
Preserving but just adding a line after every comment directing people to Lemmy or wherever the user went would be much better.
That kind of built up history is exactly what keeps Reddit relevant though. It’s been the go-to place for so long that it stays just because it is where all the content is. And now with LLM’s any content you leave is going to get turned into a chatGPT bot to generate fake engagement for their ad numbers.
To be fair, LLMs are still going to be able to scrape your content, and I’d say even more so since individual instance owners do not have big lawyer teams and dedicated server maintaining teams like in Reddit to protect their content from being scraped. My personal take is to just keep commenting and posting on the Fediverse and make this a better place over time, and just use adblockers whenever you need Reddit to find information.
No, but there is no monetary gain to scrape and repost on Lemmy. Reddit makes money when they do that, which means they’ll encourage it more.
The built up history gives Reddit momentum, but it’s not like when you Google a solution to some tech issue and find a Reddit post from 2017 that solves it, that’s materially contributing to Spez’s IPO-chasing metrics. No, that’s all about engagement, and active current users.
When you delete your history, you’re just reducing the total information available to random people who are looking for it. It may feel good lighting it on fire but that’s about it.
If we stop using it, it’s just a historical record. Stopping using it is enough.
Ar least archive it, so archive org gets the engegemant instead of reddit.com
I will never understand the desire to destroy human knowledge out of spite.
It’s not about spite. It’s about not wanting your past work and creativity to continue to help an individual and a company who are bad for society, and who are destroying a platform many people loved.
I assume you aren’t the kind of person who ever commented about DIY or code stuff then? If you were, hundreds of people would miss out on solutions to problems. Meanwhile, reddit and spez don’t lose a damn thing, except maybe a few hundredths of a cent here and there. If you’ve ever posted anything useful to reddit, you would be hurting people who are trying to use the Internet to help them in exchange for the idea of “getting at” some random CEO who doesn’t care.
On the other hand, if you never posted anything useful to anyone, carry on.
First of all, I’ve put painstaking effort into a lot of contributions. It hurts to delete them. Second of all, I don’t need to be a contributor to be impacted by people deleting valuable comments, but I still support the deletion.
Reddit had become the “go-to” place for finding trustworthy user reviews, and it’s been shoring up weaknesses in Google’s search engine for a few years now. They don’t deserve the reputation of being that platform because they regularly abuse and alienate good-faith contributors, and the CEO of the company has been caught multiple times in lies and completely unprofessional and untrustworthy behavior.
Fortunately, there are backups of Reddit and archive systems. It’s time for users who care about contributing to bring their value elsewhere, where we can build new ecosystems of user-powered value and knowledge sharing.
Yep, that people continue to have the strongest reaction to deleting content shows that it is the only thing that has any impact, since it actually costs something unlike other actions that are as useful as virtue signaling.
All those old archives is what leads to click throughs and creation of new accounts too. I’m not sure why people think it just exists in a time capsule. After all that’s how lot of people end up creating accounts. Discovering they like the content or community after being recommended it by another user or search engine, and joining and contributing to it.
And there’s always archive.org too that backs up content.
My guy I am on this platform. Notice how this is not reddit? The reason why I have the “strongest reaction” is not because I support reddit, but rather because I have the experience of needing to solve some really hard problem, which leads to an ancient reddit thread with a deleted comment. It sucks. It’s still worth searching, because it’s rare that the answer has been deleted, and it’s still worth clicking, because you can’t tell the good answer was deleted. So reddit company gets the same clicks and data. It just sucks for the person, because you’ve deprived them of useful information. Archive really does not search that well a lot of the time. Yes, it’s possible that brand new internet users could be convinced to get a reddit account based on your comment. But if you edited it instead to add a link to lemmy and cite why reddit isn’t useful, you would probably do a lot more for them not going to reddit. After all, deleted comments are common far before the protests.
My criticism is loud only because I am confident it is a misguided effort to say “fuck you” to “the man” that undermines the work and hobby of thousands of real people.
Sounds like deleting is the best route to take.