I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.
It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.
Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.
For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it’s flight or drive.
Like everything else. Big money buys out competition and then kills off anything that is not profitable enough. Parasitic private equity take all the money.
Of course smaller companies serving markets the big guys don’t want to bother with isn’t actually competition. But the big guys want to crush them anyway. So stupid.
That’s incredibly sad, and as the other commenter suggested, all too common with big daddy capitalism. I can’t describe how angry it makes me, and how powerless those situations make me feel at times. I’m so happy, and proud, when I see communities truly fight back - and I can fight along side then. So often we go out with a wimpe, I want to fight for the things important to me!
A while back Greyhound put up billboards on I5 in Washington/Oregon/North Cali with a bunch of rinky dink towns whose names were crossed out, their way of showing they were ending stops there, so fuck you hicks! But you big city folk will get where you’re going so much faster. It was a really obnoxious ad campaign.
I’ve just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like “-> fediverse”. So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don’t have value to anyone anyway so I’m just ordering by most impact until I get bored.
Not participating isn’t the only choice.
On days I’m feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I’m that petty.
Most of that was from subs coming back online. You can only delete visible content. I’ve been going back every few days and deleting the stuff that came back online.
Folks were saying they had deleted their accounts and all the related data, which was coming back the next day. The reddit user agreement grants an in perpetuity usage license, so they can absolutely do that (unless you’re under gdpr).
That will come automatically once my 3rd party app doesn’t work any more. Hopefully some Lemmy apps will be available in the App Store soon. The website on mobile is quite suboptimal.
For what it’s worth, I used Power Suite Delete to replace everything in my 14 year account with a deleted message, haven’t seen anything get reverted yet.
Engagement is what drives social media. Upvotes, likes, page views, searches are the fuel for their algorithms. (Or at least that’s what it seems to me.)
While there may be cases of actual restoration of deleted content, I’ve been purging daily since about 5 days post-blackout on my (220k karma) main account, and the “restored” content I’m having to clean up is, afaict, exclusively from single subs at this point, some of which I know have switched their privacy/blackout status between purges.
I think this is incompetence and gross negligence, not intentional misconduct. So far.
I’m not convinced that is actually happening. I think it’s usually that people deleted when subreddits were private and then things that were not deleted appear when the sub reopens. Sort of dumb that you can’t access or delete all your content even when a subreddit is private, but there are also wierd things like you can’t see your own comments that were made to people that have blocked you. Dunno if that content reappears of people who have blocked you delete their accounts. Basically… Reddit is dumb.
Chances are that many users are currently deleting masses of content. The server probably has limited resources for those types of activities. Robust design would give error screens, but yeah.
I mean, sort of? They do technically own the servers and the code, but all of the content and moderation was provided by users. The idea that this should be a unilateral decision by the company is like saying that Fiverr and UpWork freelancers should not have a say in how those platforms are run. Strictly, narrowly, letter of the law as written, it’s true. But it completely ignores where both the revenue and the value for those platforms actually comes from.
It’s their decision…but arguably it shouldn’t be. And that’s also an important aspect of this conversation.
we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
Any content that users have posted to reddit became theirs with the TOS you had to agree to first. They’ve already undeleted user submitted content deleted as part of the protests. I agree it’s time to cut them loose and move on, but you won’t be able to retroactively stop them from profiting off the content they already have.
I live where the laws are less helpful. EU and California have the helpful ones. But as a non-resident, my understanding is that the law allows full removal of personal info. Deleting posts would be selective removal and doesn’t have the “and I live in the right place” question.
There seems some confusion over its legality though, and people talking about reporting it to attorney generals etc. But that protection if private information: the information that they put on a public platform, agree to display publicly, to strangers; that’s not private information at all.
You may as well say that people on the street have no right to observe that you walked into the McDonald’s next to them, and you will report them for stalking. It’s not merely unenforceable, it makes you look foolish to even threaten that it is.
I wouldn’t put much past Hoffman or his admins at this point, but what people are suggesting as malice is extremely unlikely. The idea that Hoffman has commanded the few admin staff he’s decided to keep on staff to go through arbitrary users to restore an arbitrary number of comments is farfetched.
It’s far more likely that comments are from locked subs becoming visible again, and/or that the sheer server load from so many users making requests to delete/edit their content is leading to 503 errors, or database writing issues. Reddit code is basically one long string of spaghetti at this point.
True. We can make them pay to develop a solution to sift and present it coherently.
If they undelete threaded content, they have to undelete the context. If the go full minimax solution and undelete everything… they have caused serious problems.
If you read the TOS, no, the content does not become Reddit’s. The user retains all ownership rights, but grants Reddit a very broad license to use the content. There’s another section that allows users to delete their content (which is consistent with them retaining ownership rights, although of course this doesn’t mean Reddit loses its license to use/copy the content).
This distinction is important—what Reddit is doing here is not taking the content and copying it and reposting it from its own Reddit accounts, it’s putting it back under the user’s original account. Under the TOS, they do have a license to use, distribute, etc. the user’s content. They are not required to give credit to the original poster if they do so. But this does not mean they’re allowed to put content back under someone’s name/account/original comment, thereby attributing that content to the user, after the user has deleted it.
I don’t know all the details of their TOS, just what I’ve read from it. And I have no idea if anyone is going to sue them or anything, or even whether a suit could be successful.
But as far as whether you give your content to Reddit, you don’t, you just give them a license to use it. If you want, you can read down to #5 and see the part I’m referring to. Reddit Terms and Conditions. I think the other part about being able to delete your content is in there somewhere as well.
I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.
Reddit chose to be non profitable in order to kill off all internet forums.
It’s reddit that’s changing the terms, not mods acting up.
It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.
Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.
For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it’s flight or drive.
Like everything else. Big money buys out competition and then kills off anything that is not profitable enough. Parasitic private equity take all the money.
Of course smaller companies serving markets the big guys don’t want to bother with isn’t actually competition. But the big guys want to crush them anyway. So stupid.
That’s incredibly sad, and as the other commenter suggested, all too common with big daddy capitalism. I can’t describe how angry it makes me, and how powerless those situations make me feel at times. I’m so happy, and proud, when I see communities truly fight back - and I can fight along side then. So often we go out with a wimpe, I want to fight for the things important to me!
A while back Greyhound put up billboards on I5 in Washington/Oregon/North Cali with a bunch of rinky dink towns whose names were crossed out, their way of showing they were ending stops there, so fuck you hicks! But you big city folk will get where you’re going so much faster. It was a really obnoxious ad campaign.
There are reports they are undeleting content. The only option is to stop participating.
I’ve just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like “-> fediverse”. So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don’t have value to anyone anyway so I’m just ordering by most impact until I get bored.
Not participating isn’t the only choice.
On days I’m feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I’m that petty.
I’d skip the vote one, it’s just giving them a bit more traffic stats. Agree with the edit though.
If you wanna be petty, edit your posts into contextual nonsense that looks like it fits, so Reddit gets just a little harder to read.
Damn that’s a good idea. Sort by highest karma and make them word soup that makes readers question their sanity. I just went with ‘.’
Maybe you don’t mind doing it manually, but you can automate it too (at least until the api goes down)
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Most of that was from subs coming back online. You can only delete visible content. I’ve been going back every few days and deleting the stuff that came back online.
Folks were saying they had deleted their accounts and all the related data, which was coming back the next day. The reddit user agreement grants an in perpetuity usage license, so they can absolutely do that (unless you’re under gdpr).
That will come automatically once my 3rd party app doesn’t work any more. Hopefully some Lemmy apps will be available in the App Store soon. The website on mobile is quite suboptimal.
I’d be ok with it if it would stop reloading and shifting things around while I’m reading.
That fix is coming very soon, once we upgrade to 0.18.x
I’m so happy to hear that! Thank you <3
For what it’s worth, I used Power Suite Delete to replace everything in my 14 year account with a deleted message, haven’t seen anything get reverted yet.
Engagement is what drives social media. Upvotes, likes, page views, searches are the fuel for their algorithms. (Or at least that’s what it seems to me.)
While there may be cases of actual restoration of deleted content, I’ve been purging daily since about 5 days post-blackout on my (220k karma) main account, and the “restored” content I’m having to clean up is, afaict, exclusively from single subs at this point, some of which I know have switched their privacy/blackout status between purges.
I think this is incompetence and gross negligence, not intentional misconduct. So far.
I’m not convinced that is actually happening. I think it’s usually that people deleted when subreddits were private and then things that were not deleted appear when the sub reopens. Sort of dumb that you can’t access or delete all your content even when a subreddit is private, but there are also wierd things like you can’t see your own comments that were made to people that have blocked you. Dunno if that content reappears of people who have blocked you delete their accounts. Basically… Reddit is dumb.
Other reports sound like errors and bugs.
Chances are that many users are currently deleting masses of content. The server probably has limited resources for those types of activities. Robust design would give error screens, but yeah.
Added to @BestOf!
Thanks, I hadn’t subscribed to that magazine yet.
I mean, sort of? They do technically own the servers and the code, but all of the content and moderation was provided by users. The idea that this should be a unilateral decision by the company is like saying that Fiverr and UpWork freelancers should not have a say in how those platforms are run. Strictly, narrowly, letter of the law as written, it’s true. But it completely ignores where both the revenue and the value for those platforms actually comes from.
It’s their decision…but arguably it shouldn’t be. And that’s also an important aspect of this conversation.
Any content that users have posted to reddit became theirs with the TOS you had to agree to first. They’ve already undeleted user submitted content deleted as part of the protests. I agree it’s time to cut them loose and move on, but you won’t be able to retroactively stop them from profiting off the content they already have.
A TOS doesn’t supersede actual LAW.
I live where the laws are less helpful. EU and California have the helpful ones. But as a non-resident, my understanding is that the law allows full removal of personal info. Deleting posts would be selective removal and doesn’t have the “and I live in the right place” question.
There seems some confusion over its legality though, and people talking about reporting it to attorney generals etc. But that protection if private information: the information that they put on a public platform, agree to display publicly, to strangers; that’s not private information at all.
You may as well say that people on the street have no right to observe that you walked into the McDonald’s next to them, and you will report them for stalking. It’s not merely unenforceable, it makes you look foolish to even threaten that it is.
I wouldn’t put much past Hoffman or his admins at this point, but what people are suggesting as malice is extremely unlikely. The idea that Hoffman has commanded the few admin staff he’s decided to keep on staff to go through arbitrary users to restore an arbitrary number of comments is farfetched.
It’s far more likely that comments are from locked subs becoming visible again, and/or that the sheer server load from so many users making requests to delete/edit their content is leading to 503 errors, or database writing issues. Reddit code is basically one long string of spaghetti at this point.
That doesn’t revoke our editorial rights. I still have it, I’m using it.
True. We can make them pay to develop a solution to sift and present it coherently.
If they undelete threaded content, they have to undelete the context. If the go full minimax solution and undelete everything… they have caused serious problems.
If you read the TOS, no, the content does not become Reddit’s. The user retains all ownership rights, but grants Reddit a very broad license to use the content. There’s another section that allows users to delete their content (which is consistent with them retaining ownership rights, although of course this doesn’t mean Reddit loses its license to use/copy the content).
This distinction is important—what Reddit is doing here is not taking the content and copying it and reposting it from its own Reddit accounts, it’s putting it back under the user’s original account. Under the TOS, they do have a license to use, distribute, etc. the user’s content. They are not required to give credit to the original poster if they do so. But this does not mean they’re allowed to put content back under someone’s name/account/original comment, thereby attributing that content to the user, after the user has deleted it.
I don’t know all the details of their TOS, just what I’ve read from it. And I have no idea if anyone is going to sue them or anything, or even whether a suit could be successful.
But as far as whether you give your content to Reddit, you don’t, you just give them a license to use it. If you want, you can read down to #5 and see the part I’m referring to. Reddit Terms and Conditions. I think the other part about being able to delete your content is in there somewhere as well.
Well said!