One thing Reddit did right was that it kept your content. Even if you were permanently suspended, you could go in and view your posts. This differs from, e.g., Google where you see people lose all their life’s memories because they got locked out of their account.
I imagine that there are many people who don’t even have a Reddit account, but casually browse it just because there’s so much info in there.
But the users own that content, not Reddit. The best thing to do is to migrate by deleting your content from Reddit and moving it elsewhere. Once a critical mass of content is lost, Reddit’s value drops tremendously.
Who would care when Reddit admins take over and forcibly reopen r/iPhone, if there are no posts left in the subreddit?
the best thing to do is to migrate by deleting your content from Reddit and moving it elsewhere
That’s not really realistic for the type of content that is Reddit. It’s not like blogs or videos or photos that the majority of people have on Reddit. Most people’s “content” on Reddit are bookmarks/links or comments in a discussion threads.
It doesn’t make sense to just re-share a dump of all the links you once shared on Reddit even if you have a list of them.
It also doesn’t make sense to re-share comments out of their discussion context else where.
Do we know for sure that deleted content on reddit is actually deleted? It’s not unheard of for things to just get a “deleted” flag in the database to stop displaying them, while still keeping the original content. Restoring deleted content would be fairly simply if that were the case.
If they don’t delete your data entirely, it’s a major CCPA and GDPR violation.
I’m not familiar with the details of the CCPA, but AFAIK under GDPR you need to actually request the deletion of data by invoking article 17. Just going through your account and deleting posts is not the same thing.
Also, this only applies to “personal data”. You’d probably need to ask a lawyer if posts on reddit can be deemed to be personal data on principle, but IMO as long as the posts don’t contain any personal identifiable data themselves, it should be enough to remove the username linked to the data like reddit is currently doing if you delete your account. The data would then no longer be linked to an individual and therefore would no longer be personal data.
IANAL, this is just my personal interpretation and I might very well be wrong.
