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?
*
I think it’s generally pointless, spiteful, and only harms ordinary users who might someday have found value in coming across your old posts on Reddit from a search. It doesn’t harm Reddit itself, the “value” of your individual account is very small compared to their vast archive. And they still have it, deletion just removes it from the public-facing front end. If the reason you’re deleting it is because you don’t want AI to be trained on it, that ship has long ago sailed. There are downloadable archives of Reddit floating around that it will never be deleted from.
So I wouldn’t bother.
Reddit admins have already put things in place to counter editing or deleting comments.
I deleted an account from 2011 yet when I searched on Google for “site:reddit.com account name”, it listed loads of posts with their previous content (I used the script that changed all the contents before deleting).
All SM sites have been doing this for a while: they’ll shadow delete your account but will retain all the data.
And if they really want to they could restore the comments/posts with randomly generated user names.
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.
What disadvantages? Losing 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 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.
When I left reddit over the paid api, I left all my posts there.
But as soon as I heard about the plans re AI, I edited then deleted all content.
I see no reason why reddit should profit from my intellectual property without even consulting me about it.
That assumes that your deletions are actually deleted and not just unlinked. Even then they almost certainly still have all that data in the form of backups. There is a near 100% chance it has been sold and used to train LLMs.
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.
Update: I replaced all my comments using https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite.
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.
With duck duck go not really showing reddit results anymore, I’d say it doesnt matter. I’m finding more forums for niche things that generally are more helpful instead of full of trolls and inb4 posts.
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.
Edit it instead of deleting it, but then i doubt it’s useful because they can revert everything. Before i moved i did a mass edit using plugin and even after a few days, some comment stay the same while others is successfully edited.
There’s just no disadvantage of dumping your abusive SO though.
What does the acronym SO stand for?
Significant Other ie. fiancé/girlfriend/boy friend/wife/husband/whatever you call the other person you live with, and are in love with
It would require me to visit Reddit and log in. Disgusting thought
Loosing vast amounts of historical posts or would I say “cultural heritage” is a shame but I couldn’t trust the party hosting it …
So with Twitter I did the same, 13 years of tweets. Even took a one month payment on a bulk erase / unlike / unfollow / unretweet service to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
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 it and have not used the account since. Was going to nuke the account but as time went by I figure I might want to rerun the nuke process but I have been to lazy to do so. I have checked it and they have not seem to have accidentally restored stuff so far anyway which I was kinda expecting.
Don’t need to juke anything if you never wrote anything…
lol