That's me and I have zero fucking regrets. Over 12 years I commented with solutions to tech problems. For a few niche problems, my Reddit answer was the only relevant answer Google returned. I sanitized it all. Fuck Reddit. They don't get to profit from me anymore.
Completely fair to be honest. This was more of a post showing its funny how useless reddit can be without its pissed off users.
I hope you at least provided those answers elsewhere.
Edit: I never said they were obligated to provide the info, but if they were willing to provide it before then I'm sure lots of people who relied on that info would be happy to have an alternative source for the same info, if the person I replied to was willing to provide it again. If not then that's up to them. It's not like I was demanding that they offer it.
Of course not. But that's why deleting your account is a double-edged blade. Yeah, you can fuck over Reddit a little bit by doing this (realistically they probably made less than $1 from any one user's tech solution posts). But the people who really get fucked over by this are users outside of Reddit, looking for answers to their problems.
I'm not saying either option is right or wrong. But there's absolutely a cost incurred in deleting content like that, and the one who ends up paying most of it is not the one who was targeted to begin with.
I think your comparison isn't completely fair - you're comparing the insignificant large scale impact to reddit of one account being removed with the significant impact to the users looking for answers as if it was done at a large scale.
ie. One account being deleted barely hurts reddit, but it also only barely affects "the users" at large. If many people deleted their comments it would hurt the search users at large, but that would also hurt reddit. They are linked.
Think of how much money Reddit could have possibly lost as a result of people deleting their technical posts from the platform, and how much money they likely make in a day. Even if one were to assume that every user deleted their technical posts, I would have to assume that it cost Reddit less than a tenth of a percent of what they earn in a single day to lose those posts, given the scale at which the rest of Reddit operates. Realistically, that type of content is a very, very small portion of what Reddit actually monetizes across their platform.
Now think of how much of a person's day may be spent trying to troubleshoot a technical problem when all the answers have been deleted from the internet.
Who do you think suffers more from this? Reddit with their billions of dollars, or randos on the internet spending their time trying to find deleted knowledge?
Unless the fact that no one can find technical answers there anymore means people gradually stop using reddit. It's a less direct impact to reddit than to users, I'll give you that. But when you're fighting a corporate conglomerate you have only so many tools.
Over time the problem will fix itself as search engines begin showing results from Lemmy instances. Most of the useful people are here now.
It's impossible to quantify such a claim right now. Lemmy instances are still largely poorly-ranked in search engine rankings. For instance, I can search for a comment that I've written on Lemmy from months ago, word for word in quotes, and Google can't actually find it anywhere. It's a string of text that has no other results, either.
Note this is more than account deletion: this is per-comment deletion. Accounts when deleted do not expunge comments.
This is such a "shoot the messenger" type argument.
It's not the users who deleted their accounts who screwed over other users. It's Reddit taking a toxic and anti-user stance that pushed many users away.
Reddit is the one that's at fault. It's exactly like saying "you screwed over the kids by getting divorced from your abusive mate".
I never said they were obligated to, but it would be nice if people had an alternative to give the traffic to and also it wouldn't be leaving anyone who needs the info in the lurch, if they were willing to put that info elsewhere.
Depends what it was. If it’s programming someone possibly already provided an answer on stack overflow
Never said they were. But they were willing to offer the information at some point, would be nice for people who might need it if they provided an alternative source to find the information they'd already been willing to give in the past, if they were still willing to provide it. Hell, they can charge for it if they want, though considering Lemmy's hard on for FOSS, they'd probably get dog piled for it harder than I did in this thread if they did.
How, and be specific here, do you think OP should publish their hundreds of useful comments out of thousands over the past decade plus on Reddit? There is no easy way to move entire threads with context and answers. So your proposal, which sounds reasonable enough, isn't really viable. OP will continue to provide answers here and wherever they choose. If you're upset, blame Reddit, not OP.
I didn't know if they had a dedicated account for it or not, and there are scripts for archiving comments just like there are scripts for deleting them. I'm not blaming the OP of anything, if they don't want to do that then ultimately that's their prerogative.
Hey, I remembered a thread bashing winrar when thinking about needing a compression software then looked it up to see people's alternative recommendations.
New strat
Search: [insert shitty thing] sucks ass lemmy
Then browse for recommendations
What does it matter? Not our problem if it goes left or right let them have their shit cake.
We still live in the same society as others. People often adopt the cultures and ideologies of where they end up, or at least move closer to it than they were before. If reddit shifts its userbase to the right — even if the net effect is from "very very left" to "very left" — it will impact the lives of all of us that live in societies with large numbers of people using that site, as it'll filter down into our politics. Even if we don't interact with them.
For a long time, the "default" ideology of the internet was on the left. As internet usage has become dominated by a handful of sites owned by megacorporations, there has been a not at all subtle effort to nurture a conservative ideology on those sites. Stuff like reddit holding off on banning the Trump sub for however long or twitter refusing to implement their hate speech detection because it correlated too strongly with conservative politicians (not to mention what Musk has done there). I don't think this is an accident.
This is what you are worried about? If it goes hard right or even "very left" is that not what it was underneath? Let them be cesspools. Everybody talks about preventing, but no one does shit besides being armchair PC warriors. Go buy the website and fix it to your liking, or better yet do a strike and this will help reddit... Oh wait it won't.
All because people are deleting shit will not make it go hard right or very left. That is just straight BS.
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It's funny when people on lemmy complain about this, when a month ago everyone on lemmy was deleting their reddit post history.
Deleting or using an overwrite script, and the reasoning was because in addition to pushing out 3rd party apps, douchecanoe Huffman was opening up reddit's post history to LLM training, so that was us giving him the finger on the way out. While I agree it sucks for people looking at it from an internet archival perspective, at the time it seemed more imperative to jab the crap out of him and reddit as a business.
What's so bad about that? Even on Lemmy I'm posting things in public, intended to be read by the public, and if somebody wants to train AI on what I've given to the public then good for them. I refuse to use a walled garden. Being proprietorial about online posts is probably not the most effective response to online surveillance. I agree that Huffman is a douchecanoe though.
Fediverse stuff is essentially not commercialized by nature.
We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There's no hypocrisy in doing so.
It wasn't that Reddit was going to do so. It is that they were going to do so in a fundamentally proprietary way -- they were treating the content as THEIR property to monetize and sell.
To be fair, it’s their prerogative. I left Reddit in protest of how they were using that prerogative, but I left my account open and comments undeleted for the people who might need it later.
At the time, trying to suggest that you can do these two things in that manner was not a popular opinion and as such received massive downvotes.
Mind you this is my lemmy-verse alt account, so no meaningful clues as to what I can contribute is found here.
It's your account and your comments. You can do with them as you wish.
That's the point. If you don't wish to leave them behind to be profitable to Reddit, that's also your choice. I don't feel strongly about your choice to do it one way or another. Personally, I nuked my 15yo account and all comments completely because I don't want to leave anything valuable behind to make profits for a company that I feel doesn't deserve them.
The point is, those comments were mine, not theirs. I don't want them selling them for profit, especially to an LLM mill.
I mean it’s quite naive if you thought that they weren’t trying to profit off of you before the whole paid API debacle.
Not saying you didn’t, but we clearly valued things differently.
The long term loss of me leaving the platform is much bigger than the short term loss of me deleting my comments.
I really hate the attitude that everything is exactly the same and that nothing is ever worse than anything else.
There is nothing naive here.
Reddit changed policy and philosophy significantly and that's what led to the backlash and lots of users leaving. You know that and clearly agree with it. And using my comments for display purposes as part of the community under the terms and understanding I had 15 years ago is very different than using my comments to train AI and their new attitude that started this year.
We should hold commercial actors to entirely different standards than non-commercial ones. There’s no hypocrisy in doing so.
This should also be noted: you're free to keep your content available on these for profit corporate websites, I'm by no means telling anyone what to do, but just know that they will ABSOLUTELY not extend the same courtesy to you. Reddit bans people and communities alike all the time for no apparent reason (or stupid ones like speaking out against their terrible business practices, many or even most of whom are quite technical users who created a lot of helpful resources on the platform), deleting their content without a second thought. Worse, we live in a world where corpororations will outright kill and make it impossible to access content that we've directly purchased because the platform is no longer profitable to them and expect us to be okay with it. Not to mention when social media platforms shut down, Vine for example, did they ever think about the amount of content that they are taking away from the public? If it wasn't for the GDPR and similar privacy laws they wouldn't even have been obligated to let the creators themselves download their own content.
You could argue that the attitudes toward the fediverse vs corporate web is a double standard, and I guess it is. But the double standard between the corporate web and its users is even worse.
I view it like open source where commercial and non-commercial are on an even playing-field, what matters is their contribution. The freedom afforded by a healthy open-source ecosystem should mitigate negative commercial interests, it doesn't always work out like that but that's the kind of thing I would hope for.
There are actually extremely valuable contributions to open source from commercial entities.
I think many people just did it because Reddit still benefits from the Google traffic. I wanted results from Reddit to be less useful and I want people to be frustrated when they go to find an answer on Reddit and see it no longer exists.
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Oh boy time is flying. I can't believe I've been on Lemmy over 3 months, and have barely used reddit in that time (only for finding answers to my technology questions, like OP lol). I used reddit daily for mant years and quit cold turkey (except the occasional puff).
Aside from not wanting to send any traffic their way, this is another reason I've excluded Reddit from my private search engine's results. Reddit's value has definitely diminished as a direct result of the protest against the API changes.
That's because the 10% of people they thought it was ok to fuck over were providing 90% of the non-entertainment value.
I find this in most questions about Hugo (a website generator program)
Your result for the search leads to a discussion on the official forums but the answer is either:
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"This has been discussed before, use the search"
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Crickets
I always delete my comments after being banned by a Nazi mod so I can scorch earth their subreddit
Many folks deleted their contributions when they migrated away. So it isn't intentionally trying to not help anyone else. It was just protesting against reddit more likely.
the hope of possibly having a solution to your problem only to have it crushed all in the span of a few seconds
I don't know what's worse. That or when OP replies, "nevermind, I figured it out" and nothing else
They show comments deleted by mods but they intentionally hide comments deleted by users
Good thing there are tools for viewing old versions of a website (wayback machine for example). At least if there is a snapshot at the time where the comment was not deleted.
And add ons as webarchive allowing easy access to all those tools.
Now wayback doesn't work with normal reddit posts cuz the client side rendering bunged it all up, I just have to pray someone archived it on old.reddit.com
No, I'm aware. It can just be mildlyinfuriating if there's some obscure issue you are trying to solve.
The annoying thing for me is someone posting a question, getting help from the community, and then immediately deleting all their posts assuring that nobody can ever be helped by it again. This is kind of a reverse of that which I would say is probably less common?
And also stops Reddit from monetizing this volunteer-made content they intended to disrespectfully pilfer.