For years, I was a very prominent community member on r/vans (different username). I have been a very large content creator there and loved the community, but I’m thru with reddit.
I had the random thought to search google images for the shoes I’ve posted, searching “vans [model keyword] reddit” and I was surprised to see that my posts were consistently the top image results. Half the time the first image result was one of mine, and the vast majority of the time my images were the 2nd and 3rd image results.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg. I realize now that one user absolutely can make a measurable impact, as I have undoubtedly directed an absurd amount of traffic to reddit and r/vans thru image search engines over the years. Not anymore!
I went thru reddit manually deleting years of posts off of r/vans (admins can undue the script deletion). Now there are 100s of image results on search engines that just go to my deleted reddit posts!
Most importantly… I have created !vans@lemmy.world (alt link for apps that don’t support that format) and strongly encourage any Vans fans to check it out! I have also published the greatest shoe cleaning guide on the internet over there!
So get this, I’ve been slowly injecting random characters into my posts. Just every day that I think about it I go through my history and ctrl+shift+9 to get a random string from Bitwarden and plug it in for a page of posts. I figured it might not look like a mass delete/replace as much as a scripted one is, and doesn’t take me much time.
However, I just noticed today that I can now only view 6 years of my old post history, while I’ve been posting for 12 years. this wasn’t like this earlier this week. I can even find 11 year old posts if I know what specifically to look for. I’ve even tried with the newer web interface and my history cuts off at 6 years.
They’re definitely onto us, even people doing it slowly.