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.

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[–] 135 points 3 years ago (4 children)

Time to start building all that library of knowledge on the fediverse

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  • [–] [S] 73 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 106 points 3 years ago (29 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 59 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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    [–] 77 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    10 years of angularjs, angulat, react, and c# answers to problems just disapeared from reddit last week as i wiped all my accounts

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    [–] 63 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 57 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah that's why I've decided to leave my account on there. I'm sure some of my posts may be helpful.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago*

    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.

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    [+] 47 points 3 years ago (5 children)
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    [–] 42 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    I get it. But I also hate how useless the internet has now become for me. Kept trying to do research on a topic the other day and kept ending up at private subreddits or reddit comments with nothing but deleted comments. It will take years (if ever) for that kind of knowledge to grow again. I'm just completely at the mercy of random SEO crap reviews or gut instinct now when I need to research stuff to buy.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    The reality is that as long as we're making centralized platforms driven purely by profit the center of knowledge we're going to keep burning the Library Of Alexandria.

    Even if everyone wasn't removing their comments and making subs private, that content only continues to exist online for as long as it provides reddit some form of value. The value it provides you and others is only significant in so far as it serves reddits immediate profit motives. The moment they determine they can't meet their revenue goals they will shut it all down.

    The only solution if we want to stop repeating this cycle is to go back to more sustainable models of distributed content, rather than the VC backed blitzscaling and hyper centralization that we know as social media today.

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  • [–] [S] 22 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    I do understand. The problem is, I’m hearing that Reddit is testing the idea of forcing people to log in. At that point, SEO becomes worthless as the spiders can’t crawl the data to even suggest it to you in the first place.

    The fact of the matter is, Reddit is bloated in staff and expenses. They are already monetizing everyone’s content with awards and ads from users using their site and app. Now they are double-dipping with the API used by many to submit content.

    They chose to bite the hands that feed them so many of us decided to stop serving them food, including the leftovers.

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    [–] 31 points 3 years ago (10 children)

    Anything that can be salvaged should be copied onto the fediverse but good work!

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  • [–] [S] 30 points 3 years ago

    It was all outdated. That’s why I got some many private messages from people wanting updates. Copying it all over would have been copying over inaccurate data from years ago.

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    [–] 29 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

    I made a post about a niche subject. It is one of the top 3 google results and the only in depth review, outside of YouTube. Deleted it last week. Feelsgood.mpeg

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Hey, why not repost it on this site?

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago*

    We need a /c/ for "ArchivedFromElsewhere" or something. Simple a place for people to dump their conversations they want saved from oblivion and accessible to the public, but not in the hands of spez.

    No context needed, just post it there and let it be what it is.

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  • [–] 29 points 3 years ago* (6 children)

    The reason people keep claiming posts are being "restored" by Reddit or "missed" by these tools is that those posts were deleted while many subs were private. Which means the posts/comments were hidden. When the subs came back under restricted/public, then hidden posts/comments became visible again.

    On top of that, it's been alleged that Reddit's weird caching limits the display of your posts/comments to a surprisingly low number (I've seen 1000 and 5000). Meaning stuff older than that is simply not locatable other than through third-party search tools. I haven't seen concrete proof of this, though, and I definitely saw 12yo comments being found and deleted when I ran tools on my account. It IS, however, clear that Reddit does not respect data privacy laws that require they delete all posts on a user's request. They demand the user do it themselves while simultaneously not providing tools to do so.

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    [–] 24 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I have 650k comment karma on my profile. Time to delete my comments that were so helpful.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    Will Google searches eventually link to lemmy? I don't really know how this site works, but I would assume that could grow the site more than anything else would.

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    [–] 21 points 3 years ago

    I just deleted my 8 years Reddit account yesterday. With the help of some lines of code, still took me roughly an hour to wipe out all my posts and comments all these years. It does feel bittersweet but I don't feel the need to leave behind all my tracks on Reddit. After all they don't get to have that. This is what I used to delete my data on Reddit, if someone needs that here's the link: https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-delete-all-reddit-comments-posts/

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    I deleted my reddit account yesterday. I figured what's a better way to celebrate Independence Day by deleting my reddit account while watching fireworks and drinking a beer.

    Of course, I used power delete to remove my comments before deleting my account.

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    [–] 18 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    It hurts my soul knowing all of this useful content was removed from reddit.

    I've moved on to Lemmy, but I'm having a hard time removing everything from reddit. I know with so many people removing their old posts/replies that it will definitely hurt reddit, so many googled content won't be there.

    It would be cool if we could transfer our old posts here in some sort of meaningful way, but I don't see how that could happen in a way that makes sense.

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    [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It definitely seems quieter and the posts that are there not the same quality - that's just from a look through r/all. Not sure if that is accurate or not, but just the feeling I got.

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    [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I love the scorched earth approach. Steve Hufflepuff is such a smarmy little fuck.

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    [–] 15 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Just overwrote everything in the old account; will set the system to delete everything tonight and then a 10-year-old account is done. I will keep the account for a while longer, should they decide to restore anything I’ve deleted.

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    [+] 15 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)
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    [–] 14 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    is it possible to locally backup all my comments and posts? I just want to save some important stuff throughout the years before overwriting all of it.

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    [–] 13 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Nothing insane, but I had a 8 year account with 150k karma that I earned through informative posts, endearing pictures of my pug, and a few shitposts here and there. Banned for zero reason (yes i know, but seriously) by a mod that had an "in" with a Reddit admin, i'm sure of it.

    Anyways, just went and deleted it, after it being a very, very constant in my life. Its been quite the cathartic experience, and somewhat freeing even. Mobile and reddit are a dangerous combination for the thinkers out there.

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