Sometimes I think this whole process of deleting content from Reddit in protest hasn’t really worked out for everyone…
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Reddit could try not being such a toxic environment to people and maybe they wouldn’t do stuff like this. In this case given that the comment was from 3 years ago, the reason is most likely not because of the API scandal or AI scrapes or reddit going public, but rather some mod or other user was a persistent grade-A asshole to this poster, or started harassing them, or any of innumerable other possible toxic things, and they decided to just take their ball and go home.
I too torched all of my comments on reddit when I left, including the informative ones about niche subjects, and I’m not sorry about it.
The comment was posted three years ago, but that’s not (necessarily) the date of deletion. It could’ve been deleted much later than that, such as during the API exodus.
This was the point of the protest. Reddit is all over search engine results, especially Google. If people can’t get their answers from a random Reddit search result, the Reddit listings will eventually be deprioritized in favor of other, more reliable sources.
I thought about maybe instead of deleting all my comments and posts I could instead replace them with AI rewrites to poison them for other AIs.
i replaced mine with random gibberish. several times. over the course of a week.
then i deleted them
And then, when someone (after years) comes across the post and sees that someone had the same problem, they can’t solve their problem because the comments were deleted. This is ridiculous.
Eh, I’m biased since I did the same as Gregorum (except I left the replacement text without deleting).
People coming across it later should place the blame where it belongs: Reddit.
Had Reddit not been so disrespectful to the users who made it useful in the first place, then I’d have left my posts/comments up there for posterity. After what they pulled during the API debacle, I absolutely did not want any of my contributions to benefit that company any more.
Sorry for any regular people who got caught in the crossfire, but Reddit made and shat in their own bed.
There should be a three day holiday for when reddit officially dies. Photos of Spez everywhere with the quote “just noise”.
I downloaded all my comments before I deleted the data, and I’m slowly putting all the stuff that was actually important in places where I have a bit more control over how it’s used (i.e., the fediverse, my own websites, etc). Not a perfect solution, but if Reddit wanted to keep it forever they should have treated us better.
And that helps no one
It’s not my job. If it’s vital work, someone can pay me for it. Otherwise it happens on my own terms.
You mean like all the forums we used to have that are now dead and gone?
The need for info doesn’t change, something else will take its place.
That was really the point. Every answer to every question was a google away from a Reddit post.
Meh. My comments were not solutions, my comments were either on articles or joke comments or as part of a discussion. You’re deliberately forgetting that reddit is filled with shit posts and pointless slap fights.
Depends on the subreddit
I know the feeling.
I agree with you but you won’t get any points with that around here. Some people here are already of the opinion that if they can get an AI to respond to a question correctly 90% of the time, they don’t need these deleted comments archived anymore. Don’t even know how to argue with someone like that.
I’m the type of user who independently seeks information on internet forums before asking a question, because in 99% of cases, someone has already had the same problem as me.
I usually Google the phrase I’m looking for, adding the word “reddit” to it, and almost always get what I want. And I’ll continue to do so until the Lemmy knowledge base is sufficiently expanded to replace the Reddit knowledge base.
Here’s a novel concept: just ask the question here. I can provide the same answer I did on Reddit, now with the benefit of many more years’ worth of knowledge and experience.
Whether or not, you can access my old answer from many years ago instantly via Google is not a concern for me. I didn’t put that comment on Reddit many years ago for your personal convenience, And complaining about it now sounds more than a little bit entitled. If you wanna be mad at anyone, be mad at Reddit for shitting all over the free content, the users provided by taking advantage of them.
Thank you. I have started seeing more questions asked and answered on lemmy and it’s giving me a teeny tiny spark of hope.
And of course, if nobody answers a question, there’s always Cunningham’s Law. That works here, too…
Look, I find it kinda shitty that OP comes here of all places complaining about this of all things. Like… c’mon. Talk about tone-deaf and entitled. And ya know what? Who wants some 5 or 8 year-old answers to tech questions anyway? You want the latest and greatest, so omg, you can’t get instant gratification via google. Big fucking whoop. Wait an hour or two by gasp posting the question here and waiting for an informed response!
Kinda like one used to do on Reddit…
Outside of a web scraper, how sure are we that this poisons reddits actual data being sold to ai companies? It seems trivial for them to have an original comment field in the database that’s invisible to users or just use backed up data. Or even an anonymized copy of all all original comments not linked to any account that is solely for AI training.
Is it more or less likely to be poisoning the data being sold than doing nothing at all?
The only thing “deleting” your data does is give Reddit an extra data point. Now they can tell their AI model “this comment was written by the kind of person who will try to delete their comment history”, which is an amazing data point for an AI model.
I overwrote my comments with a message that I was leaving Reddit for Lemmy in protest of the API debacle. I then deleted my account a week later after all the edits were done.
I hope you didn’t provide any useful info
That’s the point though
Oh, I did. That was the whole point of overwriting the comments.
Reddit should not have an information monopoly on these things. We’re deleting the messages so that Reddit’s influence and degree of information control is reduced. If people cannot find answers to some of their obscure problems because of that, then they are acceptable collateral damage.
I’m still on Reddit, and once in a while I manually overwrite all my comments that are older than a month. 95% of my comments don’t have a real value, and whatever I find interesting or insightful ends on my personal Web site. It’s my information, and if I think I brainfart something that would be helpful for someone, I add it to space that I control. This was true even before the whole API fiasco.
When commenting on Reddit I always make sure to write garbage i would say in a bar, not something actually useful to anyone.
If there is somewhere a LLM trained on this data, good luck 🫡
Meanwhile on Lemmy, it’s only high tier philosophical thought.
Do the same, fuck Reddit. 🤣
I didn’t realize that it’s already been 3 years since the API fiasco. Time really does fly…
I could be wrong but I don’t think it’s been 3 years, they just deleted an older comment of theirs.
Yeah, just a joke about the date. I also forgot that Reddit doesn’t mark the date that the post was deleted, just when it was created.
April Fools? It hasn’t really, has it?
No, just a joke about the date of the deleted post in relation to OP’s complaint. We’re coming up on the 1 year mark this summer.
it might be an unpopular oppinion here,
but deleting posts & comments was overly petty.i just stopped browsing reddit,
thats not inconveniencing other users and imo more impactfull anyway.I don’t think it was petty, Reddit as a platform made clear that they don’t respect their user base and don’t deserve control over the data built by and for the community. Reddit is nothing without its users and data, leaving the platform and deleting posted content after what they did sends a clear and proportional message imo.
Getting rid of API access was one thing. It was entirely another when Spez was dripping with “Get back to work you unpaid mods! I need to get rich!”. That’s when I turned to fuck spez.
too bad… inconveniencing other users was also part of the point. Not sure how not doing anything, but not deleting it has more impact… def. feels like alot less.
Guess you cant use reddit reliably anymore for searching for stuff, too bad. Use a different platform or hope it has the chance to grow and is less shitty.
Sorry you are so inconvenienced for continuing to use reddit, otherwise… why would you care?I kind of agree. Part of the point was that they don’t want AI trained on their posts. It’s not clear that this actually accomplishes that but it at least has a chance of working.
Yeah, I’m sure they’re able to get older snapshots with the data, so my motivation was never to prevent training - which I couldn’t care less tbh - but it was exactly to diminish Reddit’s perceived value.
Before the controversy, the platform was even more useful than Google to me, and I think this puts the whole community in a bad situation. They chose profit over openness, and like other social networks, started gatekeeping the content we generated. It won’t surprise me if the platform, like many before, starts requiring signing in to read content in the near future.
If I could just dump the content I created, in context, somewhere open and not controlled by Reddit, I would have done it instead of deleting it. The internet archive, search engine indexers, and other private crawlers have a lot of this “deleted” data, so I think worrying about AI training is a waste of time after the data is made public.
Honestly people underestimate how valuable modern comments are. Not to mention you are no longer creating activity so parts of Reddit die a little.
Lol, what’s the problem with inconveniencing Reddit users? That’s the whole point! Get more users to feel shitty about the site and be frustrated with it, turning elsewhere for answers. If they cannot find them, then that’s their problem!
If anyone’s petty it’s spez/reddit. Users are reacting to that pettiness. And are 100% justified.
Is that meant to be a poem or something, lol
