WTF? View removed comment?
Welcome to “soft delete”, where database entries are marked with a “deleted” flag instead of being actually deleted. Makes it trivial to restore things a user has “deleted”. Actually, even without soft deletes, modern databases maintain an audit trail which tracks all changes made anywhere, which also makes it easy to restore “deleted” items. And actually actually, databases are regularly backed up and when a user “deletes” their data the sites don’t go into the backups and delete the data there, so everything anyone posts is technically in existence forever (not really because because backups won’t last forever but they can last a very long time).
I’m sure that when reddit sells its data to companies to train their AI on, they’re selling backups from before users started mass-deleting their histories.
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It’s for alternate Reddit front-ends and rarely ever works.
good, but it’s not enough
good
Good! The users add all the value to that site, moderate if for free and they couldn’t even not be cunts about it.
they want propaganda bots mostly now on reddit.
Good for whom?
There’s been loads of times where I’ve looked everywhere for a solution, finally finding it on google page 10+ in an obscure reddit thread with like 10 votes and 4 comments where someone had found a weird, illogical solution to your exact problem, that actually worked.
It’s a shame it went to shit. The real losers are us, we lost a lot of knowledge.
That doesn’t mean I think they should get to keep that stuff. Sure, we lost a lot of knowledge there, and that sucks. But the company lost out and pushed their IPO way back for it and I enjoy seeing Spez suffer after what he did to Aaron’s legacy.
If that’s how you feel, that’s how you feel. But I personally doubt Reddit as a company have lost out. They still have all the data. And they still have a massive user-base. I’m sure Spez is suffering real bad with his hundreds of millions…
I feel like they lost prestige more broadly but I’m obviously bias being here on Lemmy. We see I guess, I predict them tanking after their IPO.
I dont think its the same cause but I was looking for pressure washer recs a few days ago and came across a few reddit posts that had entire chains of comments from different individuals and every single one had been deleted. One of the posts wasn’t even that old (pre API change or anything like that). It was definitely odd to see.
🤷
I really need to go back and delete all my posts, I just dropped it and never went back.
Does that help the fight? I was under the impression that they got to keep all the old info
What I did was mass edit all my comments. According to reddit customer support (about a year ago at the time), they do not retain old versions of edited comments.
They do, but it makes the site less useable for people, which is a win
its pretty hostile to new users, since it sees a new acc as potential spam. reddits goal is to become like FB, just run by bots, but importantly propaganda bots, so less effor to deal with users.
You‘re harming people looking for help and support more than you harm Reddit.
And Reddit took people’s goodwill to give free advice their and generate revenue from it for granted.
Reddit already only allows Google to scrape them now, so as far as I am concerned it is a dead site. Removing my comments is worth it to not feed the monopoly that is Google.
50% of the site is basically bots/propaganda bots. people dont realize they are responding to bots most of the time.
It’s a pain in the ass to do it manually. I used this script and it helped a lot.
just say something that will you get you banned and they will delete all your comments and posts and your profile. they will appear as
[deleted]. much easier tbhI had to manually delete my account when I got banned
they will appear as deleted, but they are not really deleted, they still have them in the database and still make money selling them 🤷♂️
would redact solve this?
make sense if reddit is a AI whore, and wants the money, what better way to have extra content from delete comments.
I do wonder how much they soft delete stuff, so they can keep the data to sell. Also if they keto a history, do even if you manually delete/edit, do they have a copy on a server somewhere?
Not sure about edits, but its highly likely they still have every deleted post. Text is small and highly compressible, so there’s no reason to delete it. So it makes more sense to keep it to sell later.
I used Redact a while back. Super easy. First replaced everything with filler text, then deleted. Just in case mods have auto-rollback for deletion.
Just the cost of pissing off all the highly technical users who helped build the place.
Thanks for getting me to finally run one of these scripts to scramble and delete everything in my old account. Fuck every American corporation and their user experience.
They restored all my comments a few months later, so I’ve tried it again by editing all my comments to gibberish.
I keep checking mine, no reverse yet. Been a few months, 2 since my last purge
Exactly the tool I’ve used. I purged it about a year ago and randomly discovered that everything was restored about a month ago. I don’t know when it was restored, though.
For the record some of my deleted posts got reposted/reset by Reddit. I could see my old comments in a few sybs that absolutely purged as I left.
I know I deleted all my posts from multiple accounts before coming here.
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Don’t look at what’s been happening with the stock price.
I’m trying to get the image of spez wanking to that price graph out of my head.
censorship and being censured as well.
This actually isn’t necessarily censorship. This is more likely users deleting their comments when moving away from Reddit to… Surprise! Lemmy.
Back during the big move people made a lot of scripts and apps to do that for them and my unpopular opinion is that its been not a good thing to do. Unless they archive their answers somewhere else it is lost knowledge. I know I am pretty alone with that view so please don’t start a discussion again, I won’t reply.
Yeah, I get so pissed when people nuke their comment history. Why do that when you don’t have too much of personal revealing information in that post or comment? Even one of the mods of AskHistorians expressed frustration of insightful posts and comments being deleted by OP. I did not even delete any of my posts before I deleted my Reddit account, because there are no revealing information, and I know some of my posts and comments will be helpful for others.
You may disagree with the net effect of the decision, but the decision is not hard to understand. The people that are doing it are placing a larger value on harming Reddit as a platform to hopefully force corrective change or encourage movement to competing platforms. You place a larger value on preserving knowledge.
You say you get pissed. My question is do you get pissed at the person who deleted it, or do you get pissed at Reddit for alienating it’s own users to the point of deleting their own comments?
I have just read other people’s comments as to why Redditors delete their comments. But even before the enshitiffication, I and others find it frustrating when comments are deleted.
I do too. But I blame Reddit for that, not the users.
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When Twitter went downhill, we got bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky works as a decent Twitter replacement and Mastodon is smaller and more fediverse-focused. Lemmy and Piefed are alternatives to Reddit but I wouldnt really say that Lemmy fully replaces Reddits functionality in terms of niche subs. That’s why I’ve always been in favor of explosive growth here with each Reddit exodus, to have a forum within an order of magnitude or two of the size of Reddit to properly become a replacement.
How would I go about doing this? I want to nuke all my comments since I know deleting my account won’t
There were tools to do it for your… but after the massive migration they blocked a ton (part of the API block that drove everyone away)
if you google how to do this, you can find some threads, i used a github library that did it pretty easily with a step by step walk through, some let you edit it and fill with quotes or advertising or whatever.
I will look into this, ty!
Edited with Power Delete Suite - https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I do this every few months, scans the page, makes the changes. You can see with my account https://old.reddit.com/u/thermal_shock
Been about a month, will probably run it this weekend. Surprising I’ve only been blocked in some subs, no ban even though I said they all the billionaires should be killed lol
Thank you for the links, I think I will try the power delete suite you linked! I might do the same and just edit all my comments to be something like that before I log out for the last time. Sick of that website tbh.
I personally manually overwrite my comments every few months. Be aware, though, that you can see only the last 1000 comments in your history, so you’d better do it frequently if you are very active. I haven’t seen any of my comments ever restored, unlike what I hear from people who use automated tools.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
What a spezhole
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I get that it’s annoying, but reddit deserves to burn.
Reddit as a company is 100% unaffected by this
To an extent they are. Part of the appeal of Reddit was that you could find good answers there. But yeah, the idea that “long term their reputation may suffer” is hardly affecting them in any demonstrable way now.
100% unaffected? It makes their data worth a lot less for AI training. Even if they keep comment history, these are edits - how do you determine which edit to use? Using all of them poisons the data, and picking one risks doing the same.
On top of that, reddit has quickly become a non-source for opinions… I used to append “reddit” to any search where I wanted candid feedback, but absolutely would never do that these days. That’s less traffic, which is less ad money, which comprises the vast majority of their revenue. Reputation is virtually the only thing that matters for search, and Reddit’s reputation has been sliding for years.
People paying reddit aren’t training their models by scraping the web ui.
The original comments are still in the database, which is what you’d pipe into an LLM.
That’s less traffic, which is less ad money, which comprises the vast majority of their revenue.
and how many people do the same thing you do? they don’t really care about 1% of dedicated users…
the more technical helpful users are likely to do it, you think the vast majority of users give helpful comments?
you are forgetting that reddit is not just coders and sysadmins.
people writing comments about - i don’t know - sneakers, might not care about the reddit drama at all. and all comments are helpful as AI training material - don’t succumb to the biased idea that only what interests you is important or “helpful”
…you’re joking, right? There is not a company in the world that is happy to ignore 1/100th of their revenue disappearing.
Is it going to kill reddit? Of course not. Are they “100% unaffected?” Of course not.
There is not a company in the world that is happy to ignore 1/100th of their revenue disappearing
except we are talking about USERS disappearing, not revenue. it is likely that revenue actually increased, because x+n (where n > 0) people paying more than zero generating more than zero is bigger number than x generating zero.
Reddit’s primary source of revenue is ads, that is a simple fact. What metrics do you think matter when it comes to ad revenue?
and how many ads do you think all these now gone power users were displaying and consuming? 😂
Sure, but the users are.
