A screenshot, taken way before rexxit, of two comments on reddit, dated “1 year ago”.
The first comment is by a deleted user and the comment has been removed. The second comment is a reply to the deleted comment and it says: “That solved it. Thanks!”
Edit: added temporal context.
As much as reddit sucks right now, getting rid of decades of tech solutions that are not found anywhere else (not on the fediverse either) is not a solution. back up your reddit stuff somewhere and link to it from reddit, but don’t delete it, and don’t delete it and tell people ‘because lemmy’, people will hate lemmy.
Instead of “because lemmy”, I’d say reddit now charges money for the content, but they did not pay the creator.
That’s a problem with many companies… for example, Google Maps relies almost completely on its local guides that spend many hours of their free time adding content to google maps. Google makes money with ads, but in my >5 years of being a local guide, I only got a 15% discount for Google store as reward (after being a local guide for 4 years) which I don’t even need…
I don’t mean to brag, but I was a very active Guide for a couple years and I am still in the top 10% even though I haven’t posted a review in two years. My profile info shows that I have had hundreds of thousands of views.
They gave me a pair of Google Guide themed socks. They were cheap, poorly sized, and wore thin quickly.
My wife wrote a lot of reviews on Google Maps and all she ever got were some socks.
It’s infuriating, and even more when you start looking for that profit pattern in companies that range from “philanthropic” foundations leeching from volunteers while buying their own companies stock, to academic journals with CEO’s earning ridiculous amounts of money over research that someone else paid.
Use “Because API changes” instead of “Because lemmy”. But I agree; changing it to a link to Lemmy instead is better. Theres a shit-ton of valuable information buried on Reddit.
yeah, but Reddit was shit long before the API changes…like abandoning open source 7-8 years ago.
Well without a public API it may be quite impossible to mass delete stuff (for non EU-citizen at least, EU citizens can always do a GPDR delete request -otoh you basically have to connect your reddit account with your real name to do that so big nope as well) in the future, so i fully understand why so many people did it
Will it cause collateral damage? Yes. Am i happy I did it when it was still possible? Fuck yes.
Honestly, those decades of solutions are useless unless they have both a version number and a date associated with them. And if that date is more that 6 months ago, it’s probably still useless even if it has both.
It’s not just tech solutions. It’s solutions for everything.
You say that, but when your employer is still running Windows Server 2012, you’ll find a lot of 10-year-old solutions to problems are still very much applicable.
Even beyond that, there are a lot of new versions of things that are still built on legacy software. Some things change but some things just remain the same for a long time.
I’m running a GTX 1060, have debian Servers and my Powerline Adapter is from 2015. ipv4 is still dominant and the x11 protocol hasn’t been changed in over 40 years. Plenty of tech widely in use today isn’t getting updated or replaced or updated every 6 months
It’s usually still a good-enough jumping off point. My fiance came across this just yesterday, her sound in Overwatch kept cutting out and found a 2 year old solution from Overwatch 1 and it got the issue fixed. I’m gonna be bummed when all that data is gone forever.
I posted a reply with a “quick fix” to a Lenovo T14s issue, quite some time ago. That reply has kept getting “Thank you” replies now and again. I suspect that that will continue for a long time to come.
There is a lot of that kind of useful information on Reddit that doesn’t get outdated for at foreseeable future.
Hell. I found a 14 year old solution to a Borland database issue I had at work, buried in some old forums, so don’t dismis the value of old information.
These solutions are not always workarounds for bugs. Sometimes they are ways to do something non-trivial, and that nontrivial something can still be done in the exact same (or at least very similar) way even after several major version releases.
Not necessarily on that last point. Alot of people run older hardware, especially recently with the economy dialing back and negligible updates being made hardware wise the past 5-6 yrs. Like i DD a '15 i7 MBP with Arch linux, and if it weren’t for the Saved documentation in the Arch Wiki for this 8yr old laptop, I would be SoL on getting many things working.
This has been a meme for such a long ass time (even before Reddit) that any deleted post in a support type thread (or on a meme of the subject) was subject to someone replying “Thanks that solved it!”
The most common version of this is when someone posts to Stack Overflow asking about the exact problem in having.
The only reply is from OP: NVM. Fixed it. (4 years ago.)
And you can never post the same topic again since it’ll be marked as duplicate and links back to that useless-ass post
I saw a few people editing all their Reddit comments/posts with an explanation as to why the info is gone and they also gave a link to where they could find their content reposted on Lemmy. Thought that was pretty clever.
they also gave a link to where they could find their content reposted on Lemmy.
I wanted to do the same but I have heard that reddit is censoring any mention of fediverse or migration to kbin/lemmy and hence I just edited it out (with PowerDeleteSuite fork) to some copy pasta and deleted my comments.
Seems like if you edit the post the comments don’t go away even if you put Lemmy links. Maybe there’s a time delay but I edited my comments through PDS too with Lemmy links and then looked in incognito/other devices after it was done and they were still there.
Now I wish there’s a script to automate this
My brother you are kinda living under a rock. There have been widespread of websites/scripts to do this while the deadend(because we don’t know of what changes reddit would make of their api which may hamper the work of these services)of July 1st was approaching.
- Redact
- Shreddit
- Power Delete Suite
- (The best one, which I’ve used) Power Delete Suite Fork
You probably missed reading the comment I was replying. What I meant is a script that automate what previous comment was about.
It’s not simply deleting comments on Reddit, but relocating it to lemmy and replacing all comments on Reddit with link to comments on lemmy
ah mb sorry
I know about deleting comments, but do any of these let you back up your comments before removing them?
You can request your data from reddit but it says it can take up to 30 days.
This is why I’m not deleting my reddit posts and comments. It’s not worth making the whole world a tiny bit worse just to punish one company.
I respect that, and if Reddit had handled the situation differently, I’d be inclined to agree. But I just do not want them profiting off of my contributions when they’ve shown such utter contempt for their user base and moderators.
Why does one single corporation get sole ownership of your knowledge?
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post elsewhere.
Your knowledge belongs to you, you have the right to take it with you when you leave.
Of course you have the right to be lazy and not do that. Or to say, “I am fine with leaving it for Reddit to sell”.
But please don’t attempt to belittle or minimize the efforts of those who are trying to make a stand.
You are acting like they are doing something wrong (“making the world smaller”) when they are simply deciding that their knowledge will not be monetized by a corporation.
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post elsewhere.
If you believe that what you’ve learned is of value you have to both consider what you’re saying and who can see it. If it’s valuable Reddit is far more discoverable than a corner of the internet. It’s not a matter necessarily of being “lazy”, it’s weighing the medium with the message.
It’s not difficult to download what you have contributed to Reddit and to post somewhere.
It’s not easy either. Reddit sometimes has a particular set of posts that solve queries that are not even answered in stack overflow.
Reddit may have did a massive asshole move, but deleting those things might make things difficult only for people who seek the knowledge, not reddit.
Na, they need to be punished and by extension the world can hate Reddit over it.
Also there is that website that lets you see deleted content.
Same. I used to frequent help subs, both asking and answering questions, and I know the pain of finding a deleted answer to a niche but important question.
I never posted anything worth preserving over there so my choice was clear lel
lel
Fuck have we really gone that far back? We’ll be back to saying kek before too long at this rate
roflmao!
I’ve never seen that before and I thank you for correcting that. <3
…least I got chicken!
I’m just old and set in my ways.
I’m more of a kekw guy. RIP El Risitas
It’s funny to me that people seem to think your posts actually get deleted. I’m 99% sure they are still stored in the DB and deleting them just generates a new line in the DB with [deleted] as the content.
The irony is Reddit is still getting its ad views but users get screwed.
Same. I was definitely free tech support on niche topics I still get random DMs about months apart by a lost redditor that’s found the light. I don’t care about Reddit “benefiting from my data”… bitch I gave that up as soon as I registered an account and interacted with other users via the reddit medium.
Is ensuring an information monopoly for an unethical, profit-above-else driven corporation making the world better?
Saving the important posts, posting the question and answer to lemmy and then deleting those posts imo would be the most optimal solution. At least the information is available somewhere and not punishing people looking for answers to their queries.
Are Lemmy posts discoverable from normal search engines? If not, then it’s about as useful as the information posted in some obscure Discord chat
If Lemmy becomes the go-to place where the knowledge resides, “regular” search engines will adapt to index communities across the instances.
But it’s the obscure questions that need to be saved
Exactly, it’s like people burning the library of Alexandria again. And in some cases it doesnt stop traffic. The post with question will often stay. Just removing something because you don’t like someone’s actions… Sounds just like u/spez. And so they’ve become the thing they vowed to destroy.
Devil’s advocate. There’s no such thing as an effective protest that doesn’t inconvenience the public. I’ve heard people say the exact same thing about the blackouts. This protest would not have worked if people could use Reddit normally and totally ignore what was going on. Unlike most protests, none of this does any harm to people IRL so I think people should be OK with being heavy-handed. It’s “oh no, I can’t access reddit to help figure out how to fix my wifi” vs “protests are blocking me on my way to work, causing me to be late and possibly be fired”. The situations just don’t compare.
Beyond that, Reddit has replaced all forums and discussion boards and it’s actually a huge problem in terms of being a single point of failure. It’s a net positive that this issue was highlighted for the non-tech crowd.
Except, it’s not like burning the Library of Alexandria again, because you can find most of those old posts on The Internet Archive. Hell, if you’re too lazy to go search the URL, there are browser extensions that will do it for you.
Export your Reddit posts and comments, repost them on another platform like Lemmy then delete everything.
Keeping your data on Reddit makes it still worth using and help them.
That says removed. That means someone else removed it, but not the user.
Does that make a difference?
I was under the assumption that it was removed bc of the migration/protests. Would that be the case, I wouldn’t mind the info being lost. I’ve been trying to avoid clicking on (live) reddit links even if there’s the answer I’m looking for. Also, maybe using the wayback machine does the trick?
As I said in the description, this was taken last year, when the comments were a year old already. And even then it didn’t make a difference why the information wasn’t there anymore.
Yes, I had read that, hence the “I was”. Anyway, the wayback machine is still worth a try since it can go back pretty far back in time (if you are ever in that situation again, that is).
That’s the intention of users deleting their staffs: making reddit less useful, and therefore, shrink its traffic.
That’s the downside of having a website completely runned by the community and volunteer moderators. You mess with them, you lose half of their contents. 🤣
Answers to tech problems aren’t what drive reddits profits. They make way more in daily posts and memes. Deleting helpful comments hurts users way more than reddit.
I disagree. So many people used Google and Reddit congruently as a sort of “hack” for finding solutions quickly, not just tech based but for any and everything. Google even announced that their search has worsened since the reddit changes. For it to be noticeable by Google and enough the publicly comment on it, I’d say it was driving alot more traffic to reddit than your thinking. It also brought in non daily active users to the site, potentially turning them into daily active users.
Tldr, if this was hurting Google enough to notice, reddit is definitely feeling the pain. 😁
I fix a LOT of random things for myself and as a side hustle. Google is sometimes good for that sort of thing but but adding “reddit” into the search field generally yields far better results.
People are acting like reddit is the library of Congress.
They are comparable in the way they are both large archives of information. The thing about reddit is that there was alot of information on obsure topics.
This has "searching desperately for a programming question only to find a stackexchange that’s like “edit: nevermind I solved it” energy.
Nothing grinds my gears more than looking for a tech solution / coding solution to a problem, only to find one other person had the same issue, and then finding that the original post was either deleted like in OPs, or just “nevermind I fixed it”.
Who were you DenverCoder9? What did you see?!
I’ll bite. Have you ever been trying to find a solution and multiple of the top results are various forum posts where the only reply is people telling OP to just use a search engine instead of asking?
The absolute best is if the OP was you and you found the solution and now can’t remember and are looking again but never documented it.
Crazy how you described me of the past and I hate it as well.
Obligatory relevant xkcd.
deleted by creator
I used to moderate a tech forum and the number of times that people would message me to delete their posts because they figured out the solution was staggering so this doesn’t surprise me all that much that it happened/happens on places like reddit. People don’t think, for whatever reason, that someone might come along with the same problem as them.
I know and I foolishly didn’t consider that people might jump on the fact that this happens to have been taken on reddit (a year ago). Wasn’t even trying to say anything about anything, just shitposting.
That solved it. Thanks!
This is why maintaining your account there and keep deleting your comments/posts will destroy Reddit. Do it, you have the power.
yes but at the same time – isn’t this worse for us, the users, as a whole losing bits of information like this? the fucks up top do not give a shit about any of this
Yes, but it forces all of us to look for and construct a better alternative that’s not tied to the whims of the tyrants that runs corporations.
It absolutely is worse for users because we can only find the content via channels that spez approves of - removing the content just means you can find the content to be unavailable faster than if you had to scroll through the ads
I destroyed thirteen years of comment and post history. Is there any reason I should further maintain my account? I’m asking because if there’s something more I can do to screw with their site via my account, I’m all ears.
Make sure your posts are deleted, and sell it to an advertiser. Just look up where to sell. A 13 Year old account will make you a good bit of money, and it will in all likelihood be used to spam the site with an ad campaign.
Man on one hand that would feel cathartic as fuck, and who would mind a bit of extra money, but I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.
I still feel a bit ambivalent about deleting comments in general, like yes it hurts the company, but it also hurts innocent users just looking for answers.
weird to say but once i found a answer for a problem in reddit that wasn’t solved/asked even in stack overflow.
Once? Happened all the time for me
I looked up account buyers once. They really do hand out cash money for established Reddit accounts. They have these huge never ending lists of accounts for sale with details like how old it is, if it comes with activity in certain subs. All with prices right on them.
Makes me wish I still had my og account from 11 years ago.
Yes, submit a GDPR/CCPA (Reddit is in California, so they are legally required to serve these request to anyone ‘protected’ by US laws) request. It’s expensive and time consuming for them. It should also help you confirm if all of your data has actually been deleted. They have 30 days to comply with the request.
My plan is, one I get my data and confirm everything is deleted, to submit another request if any data was found and will repeat this until all of the data is gone. Only then will I finally submit one more out of spite followed by immediately deleting the account. Honestly not sure how that will affect them processing it but I’d imagine it should then indeed confirm the account itself is ‘deleted’.
Voting on protest polls from your communities.
I work IT, the solution I found yesterday on reddit had been processed deleted - it had not been captured by archive.org
Of course it’s not just deleted, it’s removed by moderators.
Typical Reddit.
There’s every chance that’s Reddit’s fault and the comment with the answer was deleted within the last month as part of a “burn it down on the way out” protest. If you’re coming from a Google search, it may be annoying, but if you’re posting here about it, you can probably imagine why it was deleted.
I mass edited all of my Reddit comments to say “Deleted” along with a message that I do not want Reddit profiting from my content when they treat their community so poorly. I felt that was more constructive than simply deleting the comments (and risk the admins restoring it if I were to delete my account entirely).
Prior to the shitstorm, I was active in many communities and provided lots of answers to technical topics; those answers are now lost outside of any post archives out there.
Just fyi, I took this screenshot a year ago. This was very common for years already.
I replaced every comment I ever made with a protest message.
Shredding my account may have left some holes like this
I considered doing the same but then remembered all the cases where I encountered problems that could have been solved by a deleted/missing post and decided to keep mine.
