They own deleted data too. If I would be selling this data I would just cleanup all edits and deletes starting from a few weeks ago to a time when the Internet gets bored with the drama.

In modern chaotic world usually the best weapon against something you don't like is to just ignore it (there are exceptions of course).

Why not use a bot to automatically post brand new chatgpt-generated fake comments in between edits with fake stuff? Or automate making edits that insert/delete/replace one word with a random word?

There's many different things to do that could trash the data and make it worthless for training AI. With the right tools, this sort of automation can also be made very difficult to detect (randomize the time interval between edits and the time of day on which they occur [normally distributed during prime time]).

The data is already there.

People will get bored with manipulations and they can just ignore current timespan.

Even currently, creative individuals is 0.01% of users which is easy to spot with simple heuristics especially given such a small percentage and the fact that false positives don't hurt.

Detecting automated / fake content and silently marking it is probably 90% of what coders do there even without the drama. I think they are pretty decent at it.

Even if they couldn't distinguish fake content, there's a good chance neither could its buyers so nobody cares.

I just think it's a bad fight to choose.

Costs more money to develop and run a ChatGPT bot than it is to say

    UPDATE comments WITH SKIPLOCK 
    SET _soft_deleted_time = null
    WHERE _soft_deleted_time > '2023-05-01'

Why not shut down the whole site then? They already have an archive of everything from before then. The question is what you do about future content? If it can no longer be trusted then it’s worthless as a dataset for training.

That is not how the GDPR works. They have to delete all information upon request or termination of the service.

That is what this extension does: https://github.com/sr33/ares

It hasn't been maintained in a while, but I can confirm that it still works.

EDIT: Here is another alternative. I haven't used this one myself but it seems legit: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

ares isn't on the firefox store anymore and PowerDeleteSuite gets responses that are "success: false" 99% of the time because it doesn't fit the throttling they have very well so it leaves huge gaps of un-edited posts in your history

I looked for a reddit history editor a while back and found those two as well, couldn't make them work.

I made a replacement tool that just got approved in the Firefox addons store if you want to try it out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bulk-delete-r...

I also recently made a browser extension because those two tools are outdated / hard to use: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...

Let me know if you try it! Still developing and would love feedback.

Personally I'd love to have an upvote and subreddit filter. So "delete all comments except the ones on /r/askscience or the ones with above 100 upvotes".

Awesome feedback, I'm on it!

Shreddit does that.

It’s pretty simple to do yourself. Last time I did this, I injected jQuery and wrote a few lines to delete a comment, wait a few seconds, delete another… then you reload the page and do it again. I would imagine that most HN members could do that fairly easily.

I've actually been thinking about building this sort of thing as a Chrome extension, a generic comment/tweet deleting app. More for privacy reasons than protest ones. The web based services that do this via APIs never seem to stick around long which is why a browser extension makes more sense IMO.

The AI thing is clever.

Please don’t, that just speeds up the Turing Syndrome

The last thing we need is for the internet to be harder to tell truth from fiction

[1]https://kemendo.com/blog/Turing-syndrome.html

And it will be really hard to look at the database entries that all changed in bulk to distinguish them from legit entries. /s

So make it work in the background then, registering on lots of sub-reddits and similar, and slowly shitpost in all of them.

FIND ALL COMMENTS WHERE USER = 12345 AND UPDATED % is > 90%; REVERT ALL COMMENTS

Yes, but that's even crazier when the platform is basically messing with your posts and comments. That's not what a community is. They can generate content that fits their content strategy themselve then, this way they don't need users!

> the platform is basically messing with your posts and comments

Wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last time.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

I’m not sure what language you’re using, but I’m pretty sure you have a couple of syntax issues and unintended bugs in your code.

This definitely isn’t passing any reasonable code review.

Code reviews ?

This goes directly in production, force pushed by spez.

Even that won't work because there are companies like Pushshift (I think it's pushshift anyway) that are constantly archiving comments, so they have the old comment and the overwritten one. I think you can request pushshift delete your data under GDPR so at least you can remove your data from there, but I believe they are not the only ones doing this.

Seems like a game of whack-a-mole. A person might get Reddit and Pushshift to delete their comments, but surely there are other less well-known companies mirroring Reddit. Maybe even clandestinely.

Pushshift only blocked such data from being queried via their API. All these users' posts and comments are still in their data dumps, which now have tens of thousands of copies after being released as torrents.

I am not commenting on whether this is a good thing or not, from my POV that's for each person to decide themselves.

However, if this catches on and becomes more prevalent (and I could see that happening), then I'd expect some kind of cyber-vandalism law to be enacted. They can't prosecute based on hacking, because it isn't. But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property by editing to add content that knowingly will mess with their algs. Sooner than that though will be an addition to the EULA, that users cannot enter AI generated content or they agree to get fined, or some such nastiness.

The Cyberpunk RPG came out in 1988, and I was in my early 20s. Each decade since I've marvelled at how much closer to that dystopian world we've gotten, and the slope of the downward slide increases every decade.

Why do I say that?

Because the image of Reddit that's been in my head until today is of an Open Source type thing started by Aaron Schwartz. He was a founder, but that is not today's Reddit. I did some cursory digging and found Reddit is primarily owned (majority shareholder) by Advance Publications, Inc. These are the same people who own, or majorly own (primary or major shareholder): Conde Nast and all its subsidiaries (which now owns Ars Technica), American City Business Journals, Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery, the Ironman Triathlons, many newspapers, Turnitin.com, and probably more. In 2019 Advance Publications was named the largest privately owned American company.

> But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property

But it's your comment. While I'm sure there's legalese in the T's & C's that you hand over all rights to your comment over to Reddit or release it under a permissive license, that doesn't make it right or just.

And I think reddit and other communities rely on keeping up the appearance that they respect you and your works, even if they're just shitpost comments.

They are not your comments. They are Reddit's.

And TBH the perception of owning your comments doesn't really matter in the short term... people don't care, they just want to post.

In the long term the actual content creators won't like it, but that is a problem for another owner.

It's not Reddit's content, it's your content and you grant them a license to it. The difference matters for a few reasons:

1. It means the cyber-vandalism law that the grandparent proposed wouldn't have any teeth here because it legally still belongs to you.

2. They can't change that provision because a good chunk of the TOS is about how the fact that it's your content means they're not liable for it. Their nonliability looks a lot fishier if they're also claiming copyright.

They are not Reddit's.

> The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content.

> By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

This applies to all their users, not just EU. Only difference is that US TOS make you waive your moral rights. I grant Reddit a right to copy them, but they're mine. If I destroy them, Reddit no longer has them.

Which is really just one more proof that reddit's added value is about zero and that looking to profit from _my_ content shows really the kind of leeches that they are.

If the comments all belong to Reddit, are they legally liable for any illegal stuff on them?

What's the point of an edit button then, what gives the user the right to edit Reddit's content?

>But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property by editing to add content that knowingly will mess with their algs.

It cannot. Source: Reddit's ToS and reality:

>d. User Content. Reddit user photos, text and videos ("User Content") are owned by the users and not by Reddit.

If I want to replace what I posted with seventy five consecutive poop emojis, I am fully in my right to. Coupled with the right to be forgotten and the illegality for reddit to prevent me from doing so, it serves as a perfect tool to poison LLMs.

Additionally, if they leave the edit functionality intact for older posts they would have no legal grounds to stand on. It's not "hacking", or in any way unlawful, for a user to use an option provided by a company.

I predict that if they want to do something about this they'll go the HN route and just make posts uneditable/undeleteable after some time.

That reasoning is similar to the one that I've found in r/RedditAlternatives: they're proposing to replace the content with random crap from a conlang generator.

EDIT: found the pic https://i.imgur.com/45M3a8c.png

This is basically spamming, but with a time delay so the moderators won’t see it.

Worse, the data is already archived by the data collection services. The people who suffer are going to be average users trying to find some answer to a question by searching Reddit, only to discover jumbled messes of words that don’t make sense.

> The people who suffer are going to be average users

I already notice this just with the blackout. Some stuff I find on Google is in private subs now, so I can't view it on Reddit. Sure, there might be ways around it, but regular people won't know that.

Every niche technical issue I've googled this week has at least one privated subreddit link now. As much as it sucks we needed a wake up call yet again. No one learned when forums would vanish with vast amounts of information.

I’ve never created an account on Reddit, but in general, I’m surprised to hear they even allow editing older content. Most discussion-based/social media sites have logic that locks the comment after so much time (often some timespan less than 1 day), and only allow deletion after that point.

I would also be surprised if Reddit didn’t add such logic if they figure out this (editing older content to replace it with gibberish) is happening. It seems like reasonable logic to have in place anyway.

To be clear, I’m not siding with Reddit on this. Just saying it seems odd they even allow it in the first place, especially for comments — the top level post may make sense to allow edits, but even then there’s usually a publicly visible edit history.

I actually only ever saw something like that twice, HN and our issue tracker.

Do you know if any of the "delete my reddit posts" apps support this?

Maybe even an option to keep it running and randomly update posts with GPT nonsense over time?