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My FU to reddit - Disrupting Substantial Traffic and Rebuilding on Lemmy (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/reddit@lemmy.world
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For years, I was a very prominent community member on r/vans (different username). I have been a very large content creator there and loved the community, but I'm thru with reddit.

I had the random thought to search google images for the shoes I've posted, searching "vans [model keyword] reddit" and I was surprised to see that my posts were consistently the top image results. Half the time the first image result was one of mine, and the vast majority of the time my images were the 2nd and 3rd image results.

Here are some examples.

Those are just the tip of the iceberg. I realize now that one user absolutely can make a measurable impact, as I have undoubtedly directed an absurd amount of traffic to reddit and r/vans thru image search engines over the years. Not anymore!

I went thru reddit manually deleting years of posts off of r/vans (admins can undue the script deletion). Now there are 100s of image results on search engines that just go to my deleted reddit posts!

Most importantly.. I have created !vans@lemmy.world (alt link for apps that don't support that format) and strongly encourage any Vans fans to check it out! I have also published the greatest shoe cleaning guide on the internet over there!

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

I think the most insulting thing is that reddit wants to monetize off of things like YOUR efforts and YOUR content. Stuck it to em' and made us proud! Nice work! Hope your new community does well.

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  • [–] 60 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    While also farming out the content moderation to volunteers.

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  • [–] 45 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    And still not being profitable lmao

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I mean, isn’t that what YouTube, Instagram and TikTok do?

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    • [–] 49 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Again, the easy way to ruin them would be to sneak a couple of "as an AI language models" into threads, preferably pre-2022, with a large number of posts to poison the data and render the entire thread unusable.

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    • [–] 37 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Not to be that guy but admins can absolutely revert even your manual deletion.

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

    Re-upload with pics of a vehicle instead?

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    That assumes reddit doesn't version their data, which they probably do. In that case they could revert that too without even having to go through the trouble of restoring the data from backup, which they probably keep as well.

    TL;DR you're not gonna manage to make reddit lose your data. They can get it back if they care enough and if it's hosted within their domain.

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

    I mostly posted thru imgur albums automatically generated thru my 3rd party app, rather than reddit hosted images.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    You could go to Imgur and delete your albums (or make them private or something, I don't know how Imgur works).

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I read on here recently that imgur deleted standalone posts not attached to users, which I believe would include the links generated by my 3rd party client. They were not attached to my imgur account. I think imgur's self-destruction took care of it for me.

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

    That's why I didn't delete my account yet, I want to be able to edit my comments when they revert them. I'm just going keep editing and editing, who knows what scripts I'll run this week?

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago

    So get this, I've been slowly injecting random characters into my posts. Just every day that I think about it I go through my history and ctrl+shift+9 to get a random string from Bitwarden and plug it in for a page of posts. I figured it might not look like a mass delete/replace as much as a scripted one is, and doesn't take me much time.

    However, I just noticed today that I can now only view 6 years of my old post history, while I've been posting for 12 years. this wasn't like this earlier this week. I can even find 11 year old posts if I know what specifically to look for. I've even tried with the newer web interface and my history cuts off at 6 years.

    They're definitely onto us, even people doing it slowly.

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    • [–] 32 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Dude that's awesome!

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    • [–] 25 points 3 years ago

    I had no idea that there was a sub for vans the entire 10 years I was on Reddit. Anyways, I'm now subscribed here!

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    [–] 20 points 3 years ago

    Good Job!

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    [–] 19 points 3 years ago

    Keep an eye for old posts you have deleted being restored.

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

    Yeah if you had a highly upvoted answer to a question and want to inflict maximum damage, just ask chatGPT to generate a couple paragraphs of SEO terms for the question, replace your answer with that.

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    • [–] 14 points 3 years ago

    I hope to see more and more people doing this

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    [–] 13 points 3 years ago

    Doing the lords work

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    [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    Happy to have you! Thank you for your hard work!

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

    i never heard of vans before. Nonetheless, it's good seeing such a niche community on lemmy. Maybe create a post on reddit to ask users to join your community as It's hard for it to be randomly discovered by users as of now.

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  • [–] [S] 25 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

    I tried and was downvoted even when I made an actual contributing post, and limited it to mentioning the lemmy community only in the comments.

    The core r/vans community and SamTheKing25 (top mod) is awesome and supported the blackout when voted on. But the overall reddit community has grown so toxic.. And while r/vans may be niche, it is in the top 5% largest subreddits.

    So while the most active posters/supportive community members may remain, they are outnumbered by a very toxic mass, many of whom mostly just vote and sometimes comment. And they are solely the community members responsible for the rare hateful comments in r/vans. Sadly I think the user-base of reddit as a whole will only grow more toxic.

    Edit: Want to clarify that I made a reddit post that was well received before the blackout happened, in which I did link c/vans. But I made another post sharing a new pair the other day, and was downvoted for mentioning lemmy in the comments.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I wouldn't be surprised if the Reddit admins have it set up to automatically downvote anyone mentioning one of the alternatives. It makes me wonder how often they were messing with the apparent popularity of many posts and comments. Like somethings that were downvoted were just baffling as to why anyone would have a problem with that specific thing being said.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    Yeah - I honestly believe the 3PA users were top community contributors and more likely to leave.

    I have no hard data to back it up, but it sure seems like the overall quality of content on Reddit has bombed.

    Personally I’m no power user or anything but I did have 6 figure comment and post karma. I even gave myself permission to use old.reddit.com after the API change and I’ve just had no urge to contribute. I’ve started to post a couple times and decided it’s just not worth the effort anymore.

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

    There's a community for advertising new communities!

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