Not quite. Demand is independent of supply.
The only example I can give off the top of my head is subreddit for the game No Man's Sky. Its subreddit provides the best illustration of how the game has evolved compared to anywhere else. Not just in player sentiment, which could be gleamed from Steam reviews, but also how aspects of the game have changed that are better reflected in pictures and discussions than a changelog or release blog. For example, you can find screenshots of how the procedural generation of planets in the game has changed from 2016 to today, interesting bugs that only existed for a specific patch, datamined assets that never got used, etc.
u/[deleted]: [deleted]
+- u/[deleted]: [deleted]
+- u/[deleted]: [deleted]
+- u/[deleted]: [deleted]
+- u/[deleted]: [removed by moderator]
+- u/[deleted]: [removed by moderator]
u/tehpunnyone: lame pun
+- u/urmom420: pame lun
+- u/[deleted]: [deleted]
+- u/[deleted]: [removed by moderator]It's one of those subreddits that is great to browse from ceddit or reveddit. Very interesting [deleted] comments.
Reddit always felt like a place to take from since it got lots of people by being centralized, but not really a place to contribute to unless you were contributing to the group think aspect of the community.
Communities specifically set up for answering questions or R&D were in my opinion the only valuable communities. Figuring out things or learning from the huge number of users was helpful, but it was never a fun place to just talk about any of my interests.
This is a fairly classic case of "you aren't the customer, you're the product", but that isn't the only way capitalism works.
This is capitalism and greed and disdain for the user.
I don't know if that will kill or materially damage reddit, but that combo kills plenty of regular businesses. (Salient difference is probably that user != customer, as with many internet businesses.)
So no, the problem really is greed, and the extreme resistance to regulation in the US.
Garbage in, garbage out after all.
There's nothing stopping AI companies from just using those instead of paying Reddit $50 million to scrape all of them using the API. It would also be 10x-100x quicker to do that rather than hammer their API for the comments (the API sucks for mass data retrieval)
The point of shredding comments isn’t to hurt the companies scraping the data (although that might be a nice side effect). Ultimately it’s to hurt Reddit.
I’m sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.
I think if they got a specific subpoena for me, they could find my comments with a manual investigation, but I expect that will never happen as there’s no reason for anyone to do that.
I just want to remove my content from Reddit.com and make it harder if they decide to undelete or otherwise not respect my decision.
I’m surprised Reddit still allows edit and undelete and expect them to remove the functionality soon.
If they retain versioning history I'm sure it would be easy to identify a mass edit and revert all of those edits from the user. If it wasn't easy, for some reason, it would probably be easy to revert all edits after, say, 2 days of posting.
Given that everything posted to Reddit becomes the property of Reddit (okay, perpetually licensed to Reddit), I don't know that much legally could be done about this. Unless they restored stuff posted while under-age, or PII, maybe.
But sure, things could be done to make this more difficult. It's probably not worthwhile on Reddit's part to do anything to stop this, just as it hasn't been too worthwhile for websites to evade ad blockers. The number of people who mass delete is just too small to matter.
If I worked at Reddit and wanted to do something about it though (and was a programmer), I'd add an option under individual deleted comments for viewers to click to view the comment (and any versions). And possibly add an option for viewers to restore a version entirely. This would save helpful comments, at least until some jerk decided to automate the process and restore everything. So maybe the complete restoration is a bad idea.
That could still backfire. Users may be very unhappy that their unedited comments are accessible forever. This may drive them away from commenting and participating in general.
The goal of mass-deleters is to drive down engagement. If Reddit makes the entire edit history of each comment accessible, then mass deleters could flood that history with bogus, AI-generated crap. Although it may still be possible to determine which edit was the last real one, the effort to do so goes way up, and engagement goes down as a result.
They could restore all comments a month after controversy/blackout events from about a month before such events.
That would probably restore the majority as most people are deleting/overwriting their comments as a reaction to or as a part of these events.
It’s much more likely they just disallow editing and deleting.
There are obviously ways to defeat this in analysis, but it does make Reddit's job slightly harder if they want to leverage that data. It would also probably be interesting to also just edit them and not delete them in some cases in some randomized way, which would make it even harder to reliably tease out good comments from noise.
Your comments, including here in HN, are probably already covered by a scheme like that where you give the site operator an unrestricted license to use them. You can remove the association to your identity via GDPR, but to take down the content itself you’d need to go through the justice system.
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
That could have changed, sure, but nothing indicates that is the case.
You could also go the GDPR route and request all your data be deleted, if you are subject to that. They would be forced to comply with that request.
but if you overwrite first with garbage then delete that's what shows up in the dump
Do you think they are going to go through each of your comments individually to determine if it contains personal info or not? That requires actual time and effort, and as an individual user you or your comments are nowhere even remotely in the vicinity of important enough for that.
It’s far easier for them to take the loss and delete wholesale.
Do they do this? I don’t know, I haven’t done it. But it certainly could be argued that by them not doing this, they are not fully complying with the requirements of a GDPR deletion request.
It is 100% not the user’s responsibility to keep track of this information. That is explicitly a requirement of the provider and it is fully on them to ensure that a deletion request deletes all the personal data. If they didn’t tag it properly and can’t ensure that, then that is their problem to solve not yours.
Their value proposition is also not a single user’s data. It’s the entirety of the data set. One user’s data is nearly worthless, certainly not worth enough to have a human review it. Which was my point.
Another user said they tried the data dump GDPR request and the comments included deleted comments but only the edited version, so I guess this can be verified at least.
Personally I think it's healthy for there to be a big push toward non-centralized social media.
It absolutely does hurt Reddit, if enough users suddenly remove their whole history from Reddit.
Reddit ia nothing without the content that exists there.
I'll be overwriting and then removing all my posts from there tonight.
My assumption though is Reddit has already done the math regarding the threat of reduced value as a knowledge repository from people deleting comments/posts and decided the value they lose from pissing people off is smaller than what they gain from the changes that everyone is angry about.
Especially because they probably keep backups they can pull from and (as people have pointed out) historical post/comment data is already archived and available all over the internet. Legally that data is still the property of Reddit so if AI companies want to use it without breaking laws they'll need to pay them for it.
Reddit has around 52 million users according to this unknown source I dug up[1]. Only the people who care the most about this situation will actually delete their posts (especially with a python script). What's that, like 500k people? So yeah only the "best" data will be removed from Reddit, but that's not even the data that makes them money. It's your data, remove it, but I think it's an illusion that it'll hurt Reddit any.
[1] https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-daily-active-users
Post your own blog on reddit, mignt as well have committed a war crime.
Many subreddits are fine with posting a link to your own content, as long as you observe the 10% rule mentioned in the Reddit wiki: for every one link to your own content, you should be posting 9 links to content you are not affiliated with. You should also be participating in the discussions on the subreddit instead of just linking and running.
When you see how many e.g. travel subs have been overrun with links to people’s own YouTube channels, so they can pursue the dream of being influencers, it is easy to understand why there is little patience for flagrant self-promotion.
In the case of travel, you make it seem like there is a bunch of deep content being posted otherwise. travel sub reddits are pretty bad. r/Travel is anyway dominated by pictures and low effort posts, for karma I guess? For any discussion, if you go off the accepted ideas you'll be met with hostility and closed mindedness. travelnopics was made and its barely alive. digitalnomad and solotravel are filled with escapist fantasy and insecurity posts.
I don't know which "we" you're talking about; at the very most some users tolerate ads as a thing they can skim over while looking for the actual content they want to read. having self promotion where the actual content should be defeats the entire purpose of the site.
Self promotion isn't evil, idk how people expect anyone to share content they create other wise.
Reddit has up and down votes, if the content isn't good, no matter the poster it doesn't get up voted. Bad content sorts it self out
also I am convinced that while the majority of people don't block ads, pretty much no one values them or wouldn't make them magically disappear if they could.
But the number of times I've combed over the Internet only to find myself in an obscure Reddit thread to find the most astounding of answers is astounding in and of itself.
I'd urge those considering to take additional time before making such a move.
Because it is true that the loss of the posts would be a net negative for humanity in general. It does suck to find the answer to your esoteric problem iin the search results, only to find that it is actually deleted when you try to click through.
But OTOH the posts are literally the only value reddit has, so leaving them on reddit is aiding and abetting shitty cunts fucking over their own users. It's also important — a moral issue, even — to punish them for doing that.
... BUT!!! ...
...eventually my own twitter feed was fucking awesome, because that is where the people are, and I followed the right mix of 60-70 people. Not too much content, but really good. I didn't post there, but I read it several times a week.
Then the oligarch weirdo guy bought it, and began disgracing himself and the company in various ways — one of the more generally insignificant (but personally repugnant) of them being that his own ignorant (or not?) retweeting of Nazi memes and self-owns belittling his own disabled employees etc ETC began surfacing in my feed to a degree that the programmatic intervention was obvious — so I was like, gross, this is disgusting, this is not for me (and also: I was right ...)
So I left.
But then I joined Mastodon and tried to follow the same people, but not all of them were there. And there were hardly any racists or bigots or mysoginists, which you wouldn't maybe think I'd miss, but compared to twitter the Mastodon feed I got (and still have so far) is like dad jokes and "science is real" followed by "yes indeed, science is real, look at these interesting new papers" and no sick evisceration of science-denier guy because the science-denier guy isn't even there.
And I'm not even saying I am unhappy that the science-denier guy isn't allowed on any of the instances my instance federates with (or, more likely, doesn't know about and has never even heard of Mastodon).
I'm just saying it's boring. So I don't expect most of my Twitter people to show up.
And so that is where I have — belatedly and grudgingly — come to accept the value of these corporate cunts and their proprietary platforms: they get people to show up.
So I walked back my fuck you walmart.com or whatever the fuck stance, one notch. I no longer just whip out my dick and piss all over any proprietary platform. I concede there may be some bargain to be struck.
If you make it easy enough to participate that we end up getting to see Grady Booch and MC Hammer discuss the nature of machine consciousness, or the true innovators in whatever the fuck we care about have interesting discussions... then, well, that's not nothing.
It even might go on as a win-win for years, even a decade or perhaps two.
But there's an implicit balance there, which requires both sides to act in good faith. Even though we aren't the customer, because your customers buys ads which you annoyingly insert into what we're looking at... if it's not too much, most of us are maybe OK.
But this probably means that even if these arrangements work, the time is always limited.
Because when the corporation whips out its dick and pisses all over us then... I mean, I think that means not only that the relationship is over, but also fuck you and fuck your IPO and we hope you don't make it, and if we can without inconveniencing ourselves too much, we'll torpedo that shit, because you fucked us over.
But like I don't think any of that happens in this case without the proprietary platform, because there never would have been any platform at all.
https://github.com/x89/Shreddit/blob/master/shreddit.yml.exa...
I've had that happen to me as well, as if someone anticipated exactly what I was looking for and nuked it. It's part of why I've never more than lurked on Reddit. I was on the fence about actually creating an account, but this sort of thing as well as our current drama have seriously lowered that likelihood.
If your experience is common, though, you are making an excellent counterpoint to mine. If the [deleted] posts stop people from becoming active users, that hits 'em right where it hurts.
We should be preserving its content instead.
[1] Maybe "reliable" is a strong word, but it's slowly becoming all we have. Search engines are dissolving into meaningless key-word-driven ad machines (even you ddg), Stackoverflow is getting subsumed by bots, etc. Finding truth on the web is going to be more and more difficult and draining Reddit won't help.
And - I want to delete my 17 years worth of comments, but dont have access to my account any longer - so I guess reddit gets to squat on them.
--
You know what would be REALLY interesting:
telling an AI to crawl all your comment history and build a compendium of your reddit experience year by year, or sub by sub...
and give you stats and graphs of things...
I know there are some sites that will eval your comments and tell your your writing level/comprehension...
And yeah, I'd run the script to hurt Reddit's historical data value but I don't think I've ever posted anything meaningful or useful over there. Arguments about the NBA and video games aren't really highly searched topics.
Something Gen Z gets right is preferring to localize their friend group discussions in more ephemeral places like Discord.
HNers get mad that they can't google "best blender 2023 site:discord" but who cares. IMO it was an accident in the first place that all of our utterances online are broadcast to everyone for eternity when we're almost always only talking to a handful of people, and only for the moment.
A lot of online discussion might be a lot more pleasant if people considered the perspective of themselves, or people they care about, reading their comments years in the future.
For sites like stackoverflow the intend is clearly to leave a lasting record of information, perhaps even more than answering the original persons question.
Or maybe that hasn't worked so well because it's not a sane default nor the one we operate in when we converse with others on a site like Reddit. For example, I'd like to see the argument for why my utterances on a site like Reddit need to be online forever and why I should want them to be. I can see why that's good for Reddit, but not why I should care.
HN doesn't let you delete comments. Yet nobody can even respond to my comments in the future. So it's a feature that does nothing for me no matter how great my comments might be.
What I'm not saying is that you should expect privacy for comments you post online.
The main reason I hate it when people send me voice messages is not that they're annoying to listen to, it's that I can't find them using the search function.
I'd gladly carry a recorder on me that would capture and transcribe all of my IRL conversations, but unfortunately many people would probably consider that creepy so I can't do that.
That's why I often quote the relevant stuff from comments I reply to. It's an old Usenet habit but also a way of ensuring that stuff that was interesting to me is not lost.
> Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :)
You never know if down the line some of your thoughts would be useful to some people or not. :)
> You never know if down the line some of your thoughts would be useful to some people or not. :)
Well they're always useful to those people training LLMs, for one.
I used a unique identifying username that points to my real name, and I decided I'd like to express my right to be forgotten.
Your reasons may be different, but that's a good one for me! If this is the last time this is easily going to be attained without jumping through flaming hoops working directly with reddit, I'm happy to take that opportunity.
Well technically if most done it the reddit would probably get noticeably less traffic from search engines. Would need to be significant part of userbase for it to have any effect
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304835...
It's as bad as when an OP posts a "Nevermind, I figured it out." comment without saying what they figured out.
Also: https://xkcd.com/979/
1. I felt like my content existing on Reddit could give the incorrect impression that I still support the site in some fashion, which I did/do not.
2. I'd been on Reddit for over a decade and was a very different person from when I first signed up, and even though I don't think I posted anything particularly offensive or problematic I still had a fear that some ancient thing I said could some day be used against me.
3. If I had simply deleted my account I would no longer have any control over my old content, so the easiest way to put my mind at ease was to blanket delete everything.
Not to put my younger self down or anything, but I don't think too much of value was lost. The tiny amount of content that I was particularly proud of continued to exist on other sites anyway.
Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!" The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone.
Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :)