A screenshot, taken way before rexxit, of two comments on reddit, dated "1 year ago".
The first comment is by a deleted user and the comment has been removed. The second comment is a reply to the deleted comment and it says: "That solved it. Thanks!"
I came to the same conclusion too. Nuking my shitposting account before leaving was enough to made me feel guilty so I decided to keep the other account that I used for actual problem solving and proper discussions intact for the same reason you mentioned.
Same. I used to frequent help subs, both asking and answering questions, and I know the pain of finding a deleted answer to a niche but important question.
Maybe you didn't. But maybe there was that one thing that was stupid and meaningless to you that someone found great, and others might have also. I respect whatever decision you made though, I understand both sides. It should never have come to the point of people having to make such choices in anger and protest. For money.
Exactly, it’s like people burning the library of Alexandria again. And in some cases it doesnt stop traffic. The post with question will often stay. Just removing something because you don’t like someone’s actions… Sounds just like u/spez. And so they’ve become the thing they vowed to destroy.
Except, it’s not like burning the Library of Alexandria again, because you can find most of those old posts on The Internet Archive. Hell, if you’re too lazy to go search the URL, there are browser extensions that will do it for you.
Devil's advocate. There's no such thing as an effective protest that doesn't inconvenience the public. I've heard people say the exact same thing about the blackouts. This protest would not have worked if people could use Reddit normally and totally ignore what was going on. Unlike most protests, none of this does any harm to people IRL so I think people should be OK with being heavy-handed. It's "oh no, I can't access reddit to help figure out how to fix my wifi" vs "protests are blocking me on my way to work, causing me to be late and possibly be fired". The situations just don't compare.
Beyond that, Reddit has replaced all forums and discussion boards and it's actually a huge problem in terms of being a single point of failure. It's a net positive that this issue was highlighted for the non-tech crowd.
I respect that, and if Reddit had handled the situation differently, I’d be inclined to agree. But I just do not want them profiting off of my contributions when they’ve shown such utter contempt for their user base and moderators.
Why does one single corporation get sole ownership of your knowledge?
It's not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post elsewhere.
Your knowledge belongs to you, you have the right to take it with you when you leave.
Of course you have the right to be lazy and not do that. Or to say, "I am fine with leaving it for Reddit to sell".
But please don't attempt to belittle or minimize the efforts of those who are trying to make a stand.
You are acting like they are doing something wrong ("making the world smaller") when they are simply deciding that their knowledge will not be monetized by a corporation.
Saving the important posts, posting the question and answer to lemmy and then deleting those posts imo would be the most optimal solution. At least the information is available somewhere and not punishing people looking for answers to their queries.
I think you're going to begin to see a lot of that on Reddit. I overwrote and delete my ~10 years of comments and posts before deleting my account. I imagine a significant number of others have/will too.
12 years here. It's not to deprive others of information either. I did it because if people with the ethics of Spez own it, they'll use for whatever means they see fit, meaning money, or paywall etc .
The information people seek is still out there in the same places we all got it from in order to post it on reddit.
Reddit made this mess by destroying trust. I have no idea how they'll use that information if I leave it there .
This is know: it won't be for my benefit, likely it will be used to manipulate,or in bad faith. Similar to Facebook and insta.
This thread is great. I love how people are arguing against deleting your Reddit history by comparing their own history to the content in the Library of Alexandria. The Reddit hive mind and subreddit echo chamber had a lasting effect, it seems.
I was under the assumption that it was removed bc of the migration/protests. Would that be the case, I wouldn’t mind the info being lost. I’ve been trying to avoid clicking on (live) reddit links even if there’s the answer I’m looking for. Also, maybe using the wayback machine does the trick?
As I said in the description, this was taken last year, when the comments were a year old already. And even then it didn't make a difference why the information wasn't there anymore.
Yes, I had read that, hence the “I was”. Anyway, the wayback machine is still worth a try since it can go back pretty far back in time (if you are ever in that situation again, that is).
This has been a meme for such a long ass time (even before Reddit) that any deleted post in a support type thread (or on a meme of the subject) was subject to someone replying “Thanks that solved it!”
As much as reddit sucks right now, getting rid of decades of tech solutions that are not found anywhere else (not on the fediverse either) is not a solution. back up your reddit stuff somewhere and link to it from reddit, but don’t delete it, and don’t delete it and tell people ‘because lemmy’, people will hate lemmy.
Honestly, those decades of solutions are useless unless they have both a version number and a date associated with them. And if that date is more that 6 months ago, it’s probably still useless even if it has both.
These solutions are not always workarounds for bugs. Sometimes they are ways to do something non-trivial, and that nontrivial something can still be done in the exact same (or at least very similar) way even after several major version releases.
I’m running a GTX 1060, have debian Servers and my Powerline Adapter is from 2015. ipv4 is still dominant and the x11 protocol hasn’t been changed in over 40 years. Plenty of tech widely in use today isn’t getting updated or replaced or updated every 6 months
I posted a reply with a “quick fix” to a Lenovo T14s issue, quite some time ago. That reply has kept getting “Thank you” replies now and again. I suspect that that will continue for a long time to come.
There is a lot of that kind of useful information on Reddit that doesn’t get outdated for at foreseeable future.
Hell. I found a 14 year old solution to a Borland database issue I had at work, buried in some old forums, so don’t dismis the value of old information.
It’s usually still a good-enough jumping off point. My fiance came across this just yesterday, her sound in Overwatch kept cutting out and found a 2 year old solution from Overwatch 1 and it got the issue fixed. I’m gonna be bummed when all that data is gone forever.
Not necessarily on that last point. Alot of people run older hardware, especially recently with the economy dialing back and negligible updates being made hardware wise the past 5-6 yrs. Like i DD a '15 i7 MBP with Arch linux, and if it weren’t for the Saved documentation in the Arch Wiki for this 8yr old laptop, I would be SoL on getting many things working.
You say that, but when your employer is still running Windows Server 2012, you’ll find a lot of 10-year-old solutions to problems are still very much applicable.
Even beyond that, there are a lot of new versions of things that are still built on legacy software. Some things change but some things just remain the same for a long time.
That’s a problem with many companies… for example, Google Maps relies almost completely on its local guides that spend many hours of their free time adding content to google maps. Google makes money with ads, but in my >5 years of being a local guide, I only got a 15% discount for Google store as reward (after being a local guide for 4 years) which I don’t even need…
I don’t mean to brag, but I was a very active Guide for a couple years and I am still in the top 10% even though I haven’t posted a review in two years. My profile info shows that I have had hundreds of thousands of views.
They gave me a pair of Google Guide themed socks. They were cheap, poorly sized, and wore thin quickly.
It’s infuriating, and even more when you start looking for that profit pattern in companies that range from “philanthropic” foundations leeching from volunteers while buying their own companies stock, to academic journals with CEO’s earning ridiculous amounts of money over research that someone else paid.
Use “Because API changes” instead of “Because lemmy”. But I agree; changing it to a link to Lemmy instead is better. Theres a shit-ton of valuable information buried on Reddit.
Well without a public API it may be quite impossible to mass delete stuff (for non EU-citizen at least, EU citizens can always do a GPDR delete request -otoh you basically have to connect your reddit account with your real name to do that so big nope as well) in the future, so i fully understand why so many people did it
Will it cause collateral damage? Yes. Am i happy I did it when it was still possible? Fuck yes.
I saw a few people editing all their Reddit comments/posts with an explanation as to why the info is gone and they also gave a link to where they could find their content reposted on Lemmy. Thought that was pretty clever.
I considered doing the same but then remembered all the cases where I encountered problems that could have been solved by a deleted/missing post and decided to keep mine.
That’s the intention of users deleting their staffs: making reddit less useful, and therefore, shrink its traffic.
That’s the downside of having a website completely runned by the community and volunteer moderators. You mess with them, you lose half of their contents. 🤣
Answers to tech problems aren’t what drive reddits profits. They make way more in daily posts and memes. Deleting helpful comments hurts users way more than reddit.
I disagree. So many people used Google and Reddit congruently as a sort of “hack” for finding solutions quickly, not just tech based but for any and everything. Google even announced that their search has worsened since the reddit changes. For it to be noticeable by Google and enough the publicly comment on it, I’d say it was driving alot more traffic to reddit than your thinking. It also brought in non daily active users to the site, potentially turning them into daily active users.
Tldr, if this was hurting Google enough to notice, reddit is definitely feeling the pain. 😁
I fix a LOT of random things for myself and as a side hustle. Google is sometimes good for that sort of thing but but adding “reddit” into the search field generally yields far better results.
Nothing grinds my gears more than looking for a tech solution / coding solution to a problem, only to find one other person had the same issue, and then finding that the original post was either deleted like in OPs, or just “nevermind I fixed it”.
I just came from another discussion on whether it’s a good or bad thing that others can still see the username on some Lemmy instances even after comments get deleted. What do you guys think? I’d really hate to be the person in that image who would likely be flooded by DMs asking for solutions.
Not sure that’s true. I would think you would have to contact the instance owner to request to delete your data. And you’d have no idea they were even federating
When you send a gdpr request to an instance, it is required to forward it to all parties it shared data with. So all instances it federates with.
But I am not talking about gdpr requests but data usage. Intentionally not removing data a user requested to be removed would get you in truble with the legitimate use (part of consent) requirements.
I destroyed thirteen years of comment and post history. Is there any reason I should further maintain my account? I’m asking because if there’s something more I can do to screw with their site via my account, I’m all ears.
Make sure your posts are deleted, and sell it to an advertiser. Just look up where to sell. A 13 Year old account will make you a good bit of money, and it will in all likelihood be used to spam the site with an ad campaign.
Yeah, I gave advice on some smaller / niche, topics. I didn't delete the whole thing, only my most upvoted and/or most recent comments (I went all the way to december 2022, and every comment with more than 20 upvotes). Replaced it all with a link to my kbin.
It was kind of sad reading all the replies that were like "we should put this comment in the FAQ / this is the best comment / this covers everything". I was very throughout and loved speading what I learned, and it pains me a little that the few times I lurked in those communities since moving to kbin I see lots of unanswered pleads for advice or straight up terrible advice being given... but honestly, I don't want reddit to benefit for what I spent years researching and gathering resources
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