Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
Time to start building all that library of knowledge on the fediverse
Exactly. Waiting for some communities to get formed (I don’t want to run them or be a moderator). Some have started but low activity, especially in the health genre.
I’m really excited for the fediverse. I also knew that patience would prevail on lemmy world as they deal with growth. Today has been amazing to see all the updates they did to improve performance.
Finding all sorts of cool stuff on many instances to subscribe to. I’m actually starting to like this more than Reddit w/Apollo which is crazy to even say.
I find it problematic that Reddit thinks it can just sell all the content it’s users created. I like that people are deleting everything, making the site less useful, but it is sad losing all of that knowledge. I hope it reappears in the fediverse.
Imagine if Wikipedia changed its financial model. That would be a major, major problem.
I stripped years of posts off of r/vans when I realized my submissions were almost always the top results on Google images when searching basic keywords (not gaming the search). I’ve built !vans@lemmy.world here and I’ve been posting my content from reddit here.
The thought of leaving my content on reddit and driving further traffic to that site just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Imagine my surprise hoping to see some sweet converted rides and got sneaks, lol.
I should buy a pair though.
never found this community on reddit, but im glad you’re here, seems like a fun time. /subscribe
It’s crazy how some of the communications from their CEO has been.
He clearly thinks he owns all the content on the platform and even called the third party app users ‘freeloaders’ when a ton of them were top contributors to the platform.
Stupid me thinking that buying awards for excellent content was the only compensation Reddit needed (along with memberships).
Boy was I wrong. I’m hoping Lemmy World will get awards that we can award others to help offset server costs.
He also said the mods - the ones who provide all the unpaid labor to moderate everything posted by unpaid content contributors - act like “landed gentry”. It’s almost like he’s trying to piss everyone off.
In a lot of subs it was like that though, to be fair.
Some mods go around collecting subs like cards. I’ve seen certain subs where the mods didn’t really bother protesting, or even did protests that actually drove traffic and platform engagement (r/awww and r/videos) because the thought of being removed from their positions of power was too much to handle.
These kind of mods felt like they ‘owned’ the subreddit in the same way spez thought he ‘owned’ everything. It was not free labour for them, they loved doing it and controlling content streams. If they were asked to pay money to stay as mod, they probably would.
Sorry if this post offends any of the good mods. If you are more likely to say ‘the sub I moderate’ over ‘my sub’ then you are probably one of the good ones, my statements don’t apply, and the whole ‘landed gentry’ thing is incredibly offensive.
I think the mentality at reddit leadership has changed just about 180° since it started. It’s not just Steve Huffman, although he is leading it.
Originally they were part of building a community, and users were part of that community.
Now they have become an ordinary business, who believe they are providing a service that should not just be sustainable but monetized as much as possible, and users are no longer a real community, but merely users of a service for profit. No different from Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.
But it’s a simple service, not more than a fancy forum, where users provide the content. It’s doubtful the service is valuable enough, to allow drawing out much money on advertising before users go elsewhere. And when the users go, so does the content, which can easily turn into a death spiral.
This is what stopped me from doing it. I always feel like if I’ve helped make one person’s day a little bit better, then I’ve done my bit as a human.
I know how good it is when you have a really complex, niche, problem and someone gives the answer you exactly needed, and I don’t want to take that away from the public, even though a company I don’t support is profiting off my comments and submissions.
Yeah I feel the same as a big preservationist. I feel that I got value from Reddit before, now I don’t anymore but that doesn’t take away what I benefitted from previously.
So instead I edited my top 30 comments and added something to the effect of “As of Jul 2023 I’m on lemmy kthxbye”.
I don’t know why your approach didn’t occur to me but that’s a great idea. Deleting all my content would pain me both as someone who has been able to help people with my posts and as a digital anthropologist, but making it known why I’m no longer engaging with the platform while preserving that content is a good balance between disengaging and purging.
When you can’t trust the company not to paywall your contribution or hold it hostage, it’s time to sever ties and do what you can to kill the platform. Every new contribution to Reddit is a further waste of our collective efforts. The sooner the platform dies the sooner contributors move somewhere else where their posts will be in safer hands.
Wikipedia entre database is open for download. It’s under a license which means that anyone may host another Wikipedia clone at any time.
Don’t worry about data from Wikipedia - it should be safe. Totally different beast than Reddit.
Yup, I usually download a snapshot every year or so. It’s more because I feel ways about digital archival, but it’s super convenient to be able to access that information offline as well.
10 years of angularjs, angulat, react, and c# answers to problems just disapeared from reddit last week as i wiped all my accounts
As a developer, this hits deep. RIP quality answers & search results for c# (in my case) related quedtions
The thing is - when I gave good answers, I mostly wrote them in Obsidian - so that I have Marktext files with my most interesting answers anyway.
So they haven’t gone, they just don’t exist inside Reddit any more. Anyone with the same questions could still get them - if there were an equivalent alternative to whatever subreddit exists.
In the case of Linux answers, however, I don’t give a toss - because one of the worst things about Reddit is that the best repository of information for any distribution should be the official forum for that distribution… and interestingly, I suffered zero pain using my official forum, whilst Reddit mods seem to enjoy kicking you out for a day or three for telling someone to format queries in a useful way.
Many are waiting for their data takeout requests to complete before doing the same. And to follow up with GDPR requests/GDPR deletion requests.
All to improve their quarter numbers pre-IPO.
If you don’t trust the reddit admins, why do you think that they wouldn’t keep a history of your comments, and just revert the gibberishification?
That is pretty much why I have not deleted my account yet. I have edited and deleted all my contributions, but the script misses subs that are locked down. So I check periodically if my content is still deleted, or if new comments are back from being locked down and need to be purged as well.
This makes me sad. Information is being erased that will keep people who could’ve been helped by it from ever finding it.
The people who it will hurt the most have nothing to do with Reddit.
Sad, yes. And I’m willing to admit that it would hurt the people who have nothing to do with Reddit.
But if it keeps those people away from Reddit, see Reddit as not the place to find information, see Reddit as a place that was, full of [deleted] comments, see Reddit as an awful dumpster fire, it is worth it.
It’s too easy to see Reddit as the Library of Alexandria, but it isn’t. It was a place where people willingly shared information to other people, sure, but it now isn’t, and it’s more important for people to be made aware of that: It is no longer a place for sharing information.
EDIT: Typos and shit.
Yeah that’s why I’ve decided to leave my account on there. I’m sure some of my posts may be helpful.
I originally left some posts I thought may be useful but I deleted them now. We need to bite the bullet and build that knowledge up again here. If we leave the content behind, people will keep going to reddit as their first stop and keep asking questions there + feeding the ads instead of coming here.
Yea, I’m leaving my account active but just not posting with it anymore. I only use reddit on my desktop now to view the few subreddits that have not moved to a new site/forum yet.
There’s too much useful information on reddit going away. I understand the sentiment and the act of protest, but it’s still painful to the common man.
I know it sounds like a shitty thing to do but the point is to hurt these people who are looking for help, who will then look for and hopefully contribute to a community elsewhere, which will harm Reddit in the long run. it sucks for people looking for help in the meantime
Completely agree, it’s like when Youtube removed dislikes, it’s not helping people, it just makes things more complicated.
There’s one important distinction to be made here:
- Youtube, the company, removed dislikes.
- Reddit users, individually, out of their own volition, removed their comments.
You’re free to leave your own comments over there, no one’s forcing you to delete them. Youtube, on the other hand, forced their decision on others, regardless of whether they wanted it or not.
There aren’t enough people doing this for it to have an effect. You guys don’t seem to see the broader picture. This is nothing.
