this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Power Delete Suite: 11 years of reddit being deleted today. I encourage everyone to follow the same. (imgur.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

You can backup and delete or modify all your old reddit content. 1,500,000+ karma and 11 years of my content is being deleted right now. Reddit's gold is user content: If you've left reddit, don't leave them your content.

While it's true that yes, deleting content isn't going to delete it from their servers and they'll still be able to utilize it, be aware that when they get caught doing so the EU and GDPR will fine them billions. Let's set them up for a good one.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am really conflicted on this. I agree in principal that Reddit shouldn't benefit from my years of comments and posts, but I can't count on how many times I have searched for something and found an old Reddit post or comment that was just what I needed.

Most of my Reddit comments or posts are probably not very useful, but some of it might be and I am not against other random people can find and read what I have written through the years. Reddit as a whole is a vast collection of good advice and insight that is valuable to preserve. Sure it might be archived on archive.org but that is hardly searchable for most people.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

really the only thing I found on reddit that wasn't readily available elsewhere was "how to get X game to run in a particular way" or something equally inane.

While it's a vast collection of advice and such, I think it's debatable whether it's good. It's also a bastion of fascism and the admins seem to be encouraging it. I would argue reddit themselves played as big a role in promoting the Trump campaign and presidency as Twitter did. Maybe bigger, because it gave them a marshalling platform.

All in all I don't think it's even a close decision, the plusses outweigh the minuses by a lot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I would rather leave useful information where it is for anyone who needs it to find later. A lot of Reddit is on Archive.org and, like you said, their servers so I don’t really get what this accomplishes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

so I don’t really get what this accomplishes.

It weakens reddit's ability to use that data for their own AI models. That is the reason for the whole api kerfluffle in the first place, there's no other way to block other AIs from crawling the data for content. OpenAI and others likely made tens if not hundreds of millions off the content in reddit in the last few years, and they paid reddit nothing for it. It's got reddit admins and executives really pissed off.

Thing is, Reddit paid me nothing for the content too though. At the end of the day I don't want my content propping up another fascist billionaire social media mogul with an ego problem, not even a little bit. They burned their bridge so I took my toys and left.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me personally, the value of the comments remaining for people like you and me to have access to is greater than the value of potentially harming Reddit as a company.

I'm not supporting Reddit or their actions at all but these days I feel like the oligarchs always win so why hurt the little guy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can respect the stance, kind of. Can I offer an alternative perspective on that though?

For starters, Oligarchs don't always win. That's defeatism, don't do that - for your own good.

But the main thing I'm pointing out is that there's a particularly stinky arrogance in the creation of a hypothetical "little guy helped by my words", and I know it because when I honestly ask myself why I contributed to reddit, it's for me, not others. I wrote because I enjoyed it. Both quality and quantity. And while many people may have been helped by my words in one way or another and I'm happy for them, I didn't honestly write any of it for them. I did it for me. And it was me who didn't want to see the content go off into the nether, I was the hold-up. In my view, that's again - a particularly stinky kind of arrogance. One I recognized in myself and took action to overcome. Your comment reminded me of it is all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I see where you’re coming from but I think who you wrote the comments for doesn’t change their value to society. Deleting Reddit comments to make a point feels a bit like burning books to me.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

If anything it fucks up their SEO.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While I do understand, it's sad to see a lot of past content vanish without a trace. It's damaging to culture, and even though many posts might have been not that important, there will still be some information that is inevitably lost. What would be great, in my opinion, is being able to back posts up to another place, so that they get preserved outside of Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Honestly is it all that sad? In a way it's beautiful.

Buddhist monks spend weeks or months constructing sand mandalas on the stone floors of a temple, only to sweep it up immediately upon finishing it. They are beautiful works of art, but their real value to the monks lies in the process of their creation. What reason is there to hold on to it? Instead, take the lessons learned and bring those with you, go forth and create new mandalas more exquisite than before.

I just deleted well over 10 million words from my comment history, many things I've read over and over and many I never thought about again. I'm still the same person, in fact I'm stronger for it. No need to hold on to the past.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

tried it, but it would only overwrite a portion of my comments. So I used "nuke reddit history" which does the same but it worked better for me. It's a browser extension, not available for firefox (unless you build it yourself from the github repo), chromium browsers only. https://github.com/sr33/ares