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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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.
You may be deleting your comments in the hopes that it will pull some value away from Reddit. That’s not true, in fact, the opposite is more likely. They will still keep the deleted posts in their archives, and they will still be able to train their AI models on the content. The difference is that now they get an extra datapoint: these are the kind of comments of someone who left Reddit and deleted their account/comments. If you deleted them right after leaving, that means they can place your account deletion in time around the API changes, which will also contribute to their AI profile.
You may be deleting your comments in the hopes that it will pull some value away from Reddit. That’s not true, in fact, the opposite is more likely.
I would disagree.
If reddit was only about linking websites you would be correct, but that’s not where all the value comes from. Some of the value comes from the comments. Comments provide insights, provide celebrity interaction (snoop, arnold, bill gates, etc), a sense of community, technical knowledge, stories, warnings, context as well as many other things that end-users find valuable.
Remove the comments, ipso facto, you remove value.
I just deleted the account but not my posts. I still occasionally browse the X-Men and Spider-Man subreddits, but not often
Obscure old reddit posts saved my ass so many times when coming across random tech problems. So while I understand why people delete their accounts, from a personal point of view I appreciate when people leave them up.
Yeah, not actively supporting reddit anymore is one thing, but with deleting every comment/post you basically just hurt users. Reddit doesn’t give a fuck.
You won’t believe how often I search for a problem only to find 50 "Thank you"s for a deleted comment.
You won’t believe how often I search for a problem only to find 50 "Thank you"s for a deleted comment.
That just means it’s working. It causes people to search info elsewhere
That means the info is gone and nowhere to be found anymore. Yeah, post it somewhere else from now on, but don’t delete your old stuff.
reddit is not the entire internet. Your inability to find info without using Google to search reddit posts says more about your habits than it does the state of the internet.
Reddit not being the entire internet doesn’t mean that every bit of information on reddit is also available elsewhere.
Thesis: Nuking your reddit account is good for your mental health
Antithesis: If everyone nuked their reddit accounts, a lot of invaluable information (especially in niche communities) would be lost, and this would primarily hurt average people and not reddit as a corporation
Synthesis: Nuking all reddit accounts is good for society’s health. Reddit is a trash website. In the short-term it will hurt, but long-term we are better off moving these communities to decentralized platforms. There are ways to archive the important information from reddit. Reddit thrives off the free contributions of countless users who are paid nothing, and reddit claims ownership and monetizes all content freely published to it. If you don’t like reddit, simply stop posting to it, no matter how juicy the bait
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.
imo you should, before nuking your account, make a backup of everything you said, and maybe some of the surrounding context, and then host it on a website. Just make sure your website is all properly indexed, and shows up when you use the right search terms. I have no idea what the legality of such an undertaking would be, but it would be cool. Or, if you don’t want to bother with that, you could try writing some blog posts based off of the correct answers you gave to obscure questions.
But really, it all depends on what you did with you Reddit account. If you answered people’s obscure questions, you should keep that information. Would someone look up a question you answered? Did you talk a lot in more technical subreddits? Did those arguments you have result in any positive change? But if you spent all your time on big threads with thousands of other people replying, or did a bunch of lurking, maybe your account isn’t worth keeping.
If you account is only of value to you, maybe just downoad a copy of everyhting you’ve said on there, then nuke your account with some tool.
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.
It would require me to visit Reddit and log in. Disgusting thought
Don’t need to juke anything if you never wrote anything…
lol
I haven’t done so personally. A lot of my old activity had to do with helping people with programming questions, so if it’s still useful to someone on occasion, I don’t feel inclined to remove it.
I left reddit a little over a year ago now, and I don’t really care about what goes on over there. I made my statement of displeasure by simply ending all activity on the platform. I figure whatever legacy I left will eventually descend into irrelevance without my having to physically delete it all. At this point, that just sounds like work.
I did decide to delete all my comments and posts on Reddit. Sure, maybe I’ve posted some helpful comments, but why support Reddit with their continued existence? Remove content, and people might move to other sites to get their information.
I also decided to keep my account. Turns out some content stayed around, because I could not see and therefore delete it in locked subreddits. So when they came back, the comments came back too, and I was able to delete them, still.
Use that deletion app several times, separated by months.
It can edit the posts, include random stuff and conspiracy stuff.
Sonetimes stop it partway through.
In short, yes they have “something”, but what do they have?
I contributed a lot of comments to the Godot community back when posts didn’t get much interaction, I wouldn’t want those gone. I still come across my own replies when looking up errors!
Fair enough. But a workaround that I have implemented before my previous “Reddit nuke” was saving all my most valuable answers and hosting them on my own website. What I would do now is just replacing all my comments with a link to my website: POSSE, Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Well, almost POSSE, because I’d be removing the actual content from Reddit.
I had a Reddit account I opened in July 2009 that was fairly active and I deleted all my posts and comments when I left - mainly because I felt I couldn’t trust the company that ran it to be good stewards of the content and decided they weren’t entitled to it. All the stuff that’s happened in the last year has just reinforced that conclusion.
Reddit makes money off the content everyone contributes (as well as the hard work of so many unpaid folks doing moderation) and that’s not a model I choose to support. Some of the conversations I was involved in had really help information on a number of topics, and while I’m sad that information isn’t still available to others, I think the overall good is better served by not supporting a site so at odds with my beliefs.
r/redditseppuku
