One thing I've noticed: if you land on Google from search around 20% of comments are from now deleted accounts. Try searching "best bike reddit" and see for yourself.
I think the hypothesis that power users are leaving is showing itself to be true.
Looks normal to me. This phenomena though is perhaps the saddest part of the whole thing. It'll take years to build up a similar amount of excellent info.
Curious how the new results are affecting Reddit overall. I don't know how Google works these days, I got away from figuring out that stuff for websites long ago. Would a hit to a private page and the user backing out only affect that link's rating, or is there a bigger picture of the algorithm that would see a spike in low Reddit results and start reranking the domain itself?
I'm waiting to do it because I want to leave no trace, and any closed subs are unable to have comments changed. Also, waiting til the last minute because I'm not trying to dead mod one of my subs; I hate Reddit, buts it's a smallish sub (30k) and I don't want to just leave it. Only two of the five mods are active, and he's thinking of leaving as well, so I guess we're gonna have to mod search?? At least get one person in and then dip.
I agree. It's just hard to do that to people I've been in a community with for 10+ years. Reddit won't even notice that sub getting deaded, but the users will. The only nodding we had to do was repost bots and very rare racist stuff (really not even relevant to anything either lol)
PowerDeleteSuite doesn't get everything, particularly on old accounts. PDS uses your New, Hot, Top & Controversial lists on your profile - however reddit has been limiting the length of these lists for a few months now.
For example, if you have a link to one of your older Top comments, you might see a bunch of low karma replies underneath that PDS didn't touch.
The only real way to get everything is to do a GDPR request and use the links in there. Shreddit can do this (in particular the github version, the website charges $15 for the feature), however even then it will panic and stop part way through. I've had to edit the files and split them down, and even then I haven't yet finished. Shreddit uses the API though, so it won't work after 1 July.
Also reddit have been restoring some comments evert couple days - you might find some that PDS removed have returned. Supposedly this is to do with how reddit's CDN structure works, but that may also just be an excuse. I wouldn't be surprised if reddit tries to claim ownership of everyone's comments and restores most if not all of them, so those google searches might start working again.
Can confirm. I've been doing a lot of technical setup lately. Hardware, and niche software. Any issue I had or comparison of online services I looked for Reddit was the top result and of course I would click it because I'm burnt out and just want an answer. I'll say about a fourth of the comments on the comparison/help posts are now deleted or edited to make a statement about Reddit. Everynow and again it'd be a private sub. It was super wild. Luckily google has a cached version to view the sub in those cases.
I don't think Lemmy will ever be able to replicate that utility though. There can't be an expectation of a very specific technical post to still being around in 5 years since it'd be contingent on the instance to still exist.
If the instance is federated then the content will live on all the instances that it's federated with. Every single instance would have to go away for the content to disappear.
If anything, Lemmy is way more reliable than Reddit, which is currently controlled by a whiny crybaby making unpredictable decisions.
There are already plenty of support communities generating legitimately helpful information. I expect it to only get better.
Wouldn't other instances have to subscribe to the community to cache the content? Although your instance may federate with others, I thought content wasn't shared between unless one subscribes to the other.
Was trying to figure out why imgur just always seems broken now (it's because of my VPN) and as I scrolled past all the reddit results like 1/3 of the answers had been deleted. It brought a tear to this former lurkers eye.
You may want to use something like libredirect to access rimgo, an alternative front-end for imgur; although it must be said that public instances are often limited.
I've taken your suggestion and although it didn't do a whole lot for my Imgur problem, in general I like whats all going on with it. Thanks for the advice. It may not have been the outcome I wanted, yet it still feels like a small victory.
I just tried to find one of my very popular, but deleted help comments on r/synology via Google but couldn't find it.
What I did find heartening is that they've flagged the sub as NSFW so I can't view anything unless logging in (which I can't do because my account is gone). Also, r/plex is set to private so that's useless too.
Can you put the url in the wayback machine? You can install the internet archive official extension if you often need to access past copies of web pages. Just click the extension when you encounter a deleted page.
They came after a small sub I moderate today too. My response was to make a sticky post to the sub with the contents of the mod mail and a recommendation for everyone to move to kbin or lemmy. I hadn't planned on giving reddit any more free content anyways given their behaviour.
That's a good idea, I have a small sub (only 20k subs) and I kept it dark till yesterday. I don't want to give Reddit the satisfaction of taking it, but putting sticky posts for kbin/lemmy seems like the way to go. I think I'll post a user guide, too.
On that subject, kbin reminds me of the Reddit I migrated to after Digg killed itself. It's a bit trickier for novices to navigate, but the interface is starting to grow on me, and I suspect that will be the case for many.
Meanwhile I just mentioned /u/spez in a comment and promptly got an auto moderator notification that you're not allowed to username-mention admins anymore, so I guess he's tired of having his inbox consist of 100,000 messages telling him to GFY.
I would imagine the admins will just revert the deletion. Their hands are tied by law in a number of places regarding a user deleting their own data, but a sub might fall into a grey area they feel legally safe to revert.
It's just manipulation of course. They're trying to guilt-trip mods into doing what Reddit wants. Reddit's concern here is obviously not for the poor innocent users being deprived their access to these subreddits. Reddit's concern is maximising the amount of cash that flows into their pockets.
If Reddit actually cared about the users then they would respect the subreddits where users have voted to keep the subreddit private or change the subreddit to NSFW content. But Reddit is not respecting these votes from users, because they only care about the cash flowing into their pockets.
That's easy.
Reopen the sub and put a sticky post with info on how to join kbin/lemmy and encouraging users to give it a try and join the fediverse alternative sub you've created.
Then if you post any content- do it on the fediverse, and if you post it to Reddit just make it a link post to the fediverse page that has the content. Optionally disable comments or filter them.
Twitter blocked links Mastadon for a hot minute calling them spam or unsafe or something. IIRC they backed down after a couple of days. Reddit has already been getting shit press for the last couple of weeks, tech journos are watching this all unfold closely, is Reddit dumb enough to take an action that is blatantly censorship and anticompetitive? It would be totally unspinable.
If they do that, it'll tell you a lot about reddits thinking here. Spez current position is that the people complaining are a small minority and this will all blow over soon. If Reddit really believes that, then they best course of action is to let the complainers post their Lemmy/Kbin links, avoid a fresh round of bad press, and the lemmy/Kbin users will be gone in a couple of weeks and the reddit user base will remain largely intact. If Reddit views the risk of a mass migration to be a real and existential threat to their business, despite what they are saying publicly, then blocking Lemmy/Kbin links would make sense as a last ditch effort to keep their user base of casual users ignorant of popular alternatives, bad press being a necessary cost worth paying to try to retain the user base they need to sell for their ipo. All for that assumes Reddit is behaving rationally though, which Spez has shown isn't a safe assumption.
Agree that rationality is not a safe assumption. None of this has been rational- it feels like Spez is having a temper tantrum (as would a small child) and those around him are desperately trying to channel it into professional-ish actions.
Also makes sense if Spez is Ellen Pao 2.0- board decides unpopular changes need to be made, so they pay Spez extra to do 120% of what they want and be the fall guy. He goes nuts for a while, then resigns, and is replaced with some suit who looks good on TV and has a bit of social media cred. That guy then says all the right things to the community and walks back 20% of the changes.
This probably all pushes the IPO back a year or so, but if they think they can increase revenue in that time, it makes some sense.
At this point though I wouldn't put anything past Reddit.
I have to think someone there is smart enough to know if they block fediverse links that's a huge escalation that makes them OBVIOUSLY the 'bad guys' even in the eyes of people who DGAF about the API nonsense.
From the POV of a 3rd party observer, it COULD be argued that Reddit is just dumping freeloaders, a bunch of the users don't like it and want shit for free, and it's a stupid forum drama squabble.
But as soon as they start actively suppressing competitors, that becomes a lot harder to see as anything other than 'actively stopping their users who want to leave from leaving'.
It seems lemmy links were removed from r/Piracy's sidebar (maybe by the mods, possibly by admins), but their pinned post still has links to both their own piracy instance and the piracy community on lemmy.ml. So maybe pinned posts are safe.
Reddit is already making liberal use of AI bots to post and reply, I suspect they will use them to moderate soon enough. After a while, it will just be bots talking to bots (self-generated content) and I think Reddit management will be fine with that as long as Wall Street doesn't notice or care.
All the more reason to keep mentioning them in regular comments then - they might be able to moderate stickied posts themselves but they can't read through every comment on every subreddit.
Why not just program a bot to crawl their site looking for any string that says "lemmy" or "l e m m y" or what have you? I'd think it's be easy for them to do, the bigger question is what kind of backlash they would get for it.
I'd be more worried about martyring lemmy on Reddit which would just force more traffic over here imo.
Or maybe they dont think Lemmy is actually a threat.
Well since the subreddit belongs to the community, I think you should do like r/PliticalHumor and leave it to the community. Everyone becomes a mod and no rules are present or enforced.
I wonder how long it'll be before they scrape the bottom of the barrel and send that message to me for closing the r/dfshow sub. The sub is a support community for my DF-SHOW Unix (and Unixlike) terminal file manager. I was planning on unveiling the sub as part of the 0.10 release of the project, however, the API drama kicked off before then.
If they do decide to forcefully reopen the sub by kicking the only moderator, who is the sole developer of the project and currently the only subscriber to the sub, then we'll know they're desperate!
They steal your sub if you stay inactive, they steal your sub if you switch to porn... I guess the last viable option for visible protest on reddit is another John Oliver sub. That and leaving.
I responded by opening a /r/mildlyinteresting style user poll and switching the subreddit to restricted mode so people could actually vote on it. At least that way, I've got grounds to say I'm acting on behalf of the users. If the poll result was to reopen, my plan was to attempt to hand over the subreddit to the team behind the project it's about (which I'd tried before when there were like ten subscribers, but it's more compelling now there are 80K), but it looks like staying closed is winning.
I don't want to destroy the subreddit until all its posts have been backed up somewhere else that gets indexed by Google as it's an important tech support resource.
@cm0002 , I would recreate the sub on kbin.social (or whatever instance you favor) as a magazine. Id copy whatever FAQs and guides your sub has and post them to your magazine. I'd download and then delete all of your Reddit comments and anything you personally have written.
Then I would post a sticky with instructions on where to find the new magazine on the Fediverse. Also post the info at r/RedditAlternatives and r/ModCoord (not sure if I got the sub's name right, someone correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't know if I'd go scorched earth and open up everything to minimal moderating, or if I would quit. But definitely create an alternative community for your sub here, so ex Redditors have somewhere to go.
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