Personally, I wiped all of my personal Reddit accounts last year. I now use short-lived anonymous accounts which I also wipe after awhile. I use Shreddit [^0] to wipe the account before deleting it. I do wish that I was able to backup some valuable conversations, but I honestly wouldn't find much worth in the backups without the additional context. So perhaps something to explore -- also storing the context of a particular comment with a configurable depth.
I've found a very light set of restrictions - possibly even only on select posts - is tremendously helpful for content quality. But anything beyond a light set quickly throws the whole community off kilter and into a self-congratulatory echo chamber.
I've made a lot of alts and that never has been a problem, just post some vaguely affirmative comment in popular thread and boom, 50 karma.
The whole idea is utterly stupid because it is far too easy to get on popular low effort subreddit and get some points for posting absolute garbage, then go and bother people in niche subreddit.
Reddit is a really, really, really good system for connecting people who have a niche interest. You can still do forums and so forth for those things, but discoverability isn't nearly as good. It's been co-opted by venture capital and is becoming less so, but right now it's a great community unmatched elsewhere on the internet in it's scale and quality.
Benson Leung who is fairly well known for his USB C reviews is now a moderator of /r/UsbCHardware/ and through him I was able to fix a bug in the USB C specification. I have no idea how I would've done it without the connection Reddit provides. I posted the bugfix at https://superuser.com/a/1536688/41259
Reddit wasn't "co-opted" by venture capital. It was built by venture capital!
It literally started as a result of the founders taking money from YC and pivoting away from their original idea and to Reddit at Paul Graham's request.
Reddit is a really good system for getting incredibly-niche oriented persons to subsume a subreddit, drive a bunch of engagement, yet suck all the usable air out of the channel, and make it next to impossible for a interested-but-casual user to meaningfully participate. Just like Twitter, the people who make the service their personality get to enjoy the network effects, and everyone else might as well be spitting in the wind.
I think you know full well that I'm not advocating pEoPLE BeIng lESS iNTErESTEd in THiNGS. My idea would be to assign karma based on a logarithmic scale so that people with "just" an interest in the topic aren't immediately shoved to the bottom of the barrel by people with nothing but time to make the site their personality.
It probably depends on the niche. I've found reddit occasionally useful for this, but the community on reddit tends to be a bit monolithic, so I've not found reddit useful as a sole, or primary, source of this sort of thing.
I mean, I hear you if you're posting your opinion as comment 18,753 on an r/news post about the former president. But I've had some genuinely helpful interactions on smaller subreddits - things like getting guidance on how to repair old Nintendo Game and Watch hardware. It's not about getting one's opinion heard, it's about giving and getting help among folks who share the same hobby.
I don't have any affection for Reddit itself, but there are a couple of subreddits where I guess the small but critical mass of folks for a hobby somehow ended up there, and I hope they land somewhere else as Reddit commits suicide.
> What’s the point to get your “2c” heard on Hacker News?
Archiving helps me know more about myself. Primarily, I use forums as a way to archive my viewpoints and how I have reasoned them. It's spectacularly rewarding when discussions devolve into an argument and I know specifically how and why I came to a certain conclusion, because I can reference thoughts that I reasoned before. Rarely, I find my views challenged in a constructive way that informs and changes the mind of one party or the other...if only on tangential topics. That's always nice.
It's also handy to listen to the echo chamber to get ahold of the zeitgeist of that particular group, which is useful when interacting with other people in real life that espouse particular aligned views. Now you can have an interesting conversation, you might not have had otherwise, which is a practical benefit.
I'm going to miss the computer hardware sell/trade subreddits, they're one of the most active I've found and saves 20-40% over eBay or similar. All require a minimum account age and karma to reduce the risk of scammers.
> Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.
Everywhere can be an echo chamber, even here.
Reddit is nice for the small subs/communities where you can talk about something niche so you don't have to go register in some archaic phpbb forum that might go away.
The bigger the sub, the more likely it will echo. Much like the bigger the story here the same effect will happen. I think that's just humanity. It is very easy to identify and move on/not follow those subs.
Not that much, not unless they are related somehow (say /r/games and /r/pcgaming). Even then they can feel quite differently depending on moderator policy.
There are legitimate use cases for reddit interactions. Some of the smaller communities in particular, discussing specific games or health conditions for example, actually are excellent. Most are not that good, however.
Some of the serious technical discussion subreddits I use for technical discussions won’t allow anyone with new accounts or a low amount of karma to participate.
If you’re trying to have a technical discussion, you’d be locked out.
Bad news: it depends on how you delete your comments. If you just delete your comments via the delete button, Reddit will still archive your last 1000 comments and posts. Not sure how shreddit and other similar apps work, but I think you need to update and replace your old posts with something blank like a space before you delete them. My knowledge might be out of date, so feel free to point out that I’m wrong.
I would absolutely trade in public displays of karma for having a random username assigned to every one of my posts with my history being obscured while still keeping track of "karma" for moderation / feature gating.
The same point everywhere - to drive discussion to popular posts and away from unpopular posts, and to encourage conformity to board culture through operant conditioning and gamification. If you give people a number and tell them that number is special, they'll do whatever they can to make that number go up, and to avoid whatever makes it go down.
At least in theory. In practice it's utterly useless because it's based on incorrect (or possibly outdated) assumptions about the nature and goals of HN's userbase (which I've decided to call the "good hacker" fallacy.)
You are stealing: downvote. You are playing music too loud: downvote, right away. Driving too fast: downvote. Slow: downvote. You are charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses: you get downvoted. You undercook fish? Believe it or not, Downvote. You overcook chicken, also downvote. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, downvote, right away. We have the best patients in the world because of downvoting.
I think that sites really shouldn't have guidance on this sort of thing, because nobody would follow it anyway. If you only have upvotes and downvotes, people are just going to upvote stuff they like and downvote stuff they don't like, and any individual will have different rules about what "like" or "doesn't like" means to them.
Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful", "Funny", "Off topic", etc.
Can't disagree with this enough. Twitter exists, and it sucks. Every site that only allows upvoting becomes a segregated cesspool as different factions just cheerlead in their own tribal zones.
I wonder how it would work if we had different kinds of upvote/downvote.
Then again if given a choice between "I disagree" and "you're a moron for saying that", people would just pick second if it is a disagreement about something they feel strongly about
When my comments get downvoted, sometimes I can figure out why. It's frivolous, off-topic, just plain wrong, etc.
But quite often, I have no idea whatsoever, and I'm always curious about what the issue was. I think potentially valuable information and personal learning is lost.
In my experience it's when you post something that someone has a strong opposing opinion about. Same for flagging, seems to be treated as a super-downvote most of the time.
Not sure if you mean keeping track of total upvotes or just the voting system in general. In either case, just for a start, I think discussions are easier to have & follow along with when someone can just upvote a comment to engage in the discussion vs posting something like "+1" or "^ this" or "I agree", and the number is the same feedback in lieu of meaningless posts. Voting also helps with ordering (as opposed to time based ordering), whether your total karma is displayed or not.
The average upvote count for comments here is 5, anecdotally. On reddit it can be in the dozens, even hundreds depending on subreddit. My abandoned reddit account I had for 2 years had 39k karma, and I wasn't obsessed.
Given that data collection companies would have long since archived your comments into their data stores, deleting all of your comments after a few years is likely only harming everyone else trying to read old threads through the website (rather than data collection archives).
It’s becoming increasingly frustrating to read old Reddit threads about technical issues where someone went back and deleted all of their posts. Trying to guess what was discussed by reading every other comment is a frustrating experience.
I get the frustration, but it still would to put pressure on them. Because even though the data might have been scraped/bought, it means that people would not go to reddit to find information, as it'd be deleted/worthless.
So yes, it's acknowledging that you can't take back the scraped data, but you can at least poison the well for others who would use it.
And yes, it would harm current users of reddit. That's kind of the point, because I don't think reddit makes any significant changes unless they get significant pushback from the thing they're trying to sell -- #s of users.
I also get annoyed when I see missing comments, but I don't think this is a good reading of the situation. Reddit is restricting access to its API. It's not good for the world if a company can say "look how much value you're giving everyone, you're morally obligated to them to let us keep abusing you." Users aren't obligated to play into that trap. I mean, if I'm going to treat content on Reddit like it's a public good that I'm morally obligated to provide, then maybe it's bad for a for-profit business that fights with its community to be in charge of that public good.
Particularly in the context of the current API decisions, the thing Reddit is doing is closing off access to that data. A user saying, "fine, but if you're not going to allow open access then I'll stop treating my content like it's open access and I'll remove it" is I think a pretty reasonable response (both for the user and for society). The alternative is Reddit gets to lock down that data, but because it hasn't gone all the way yet and completely locked it down, everyone is still obligated to let them keep that data? It just doesn't make sense.
It was brought up above, but Reddit archives exist. So it's not necessarily like the content is entirely lost. But it's less convenient to access, and that's purposeful, because it's bad for society if we allow commercial gatekeepers in front of communities to guilt users into making it easier for them to lock down and commoditize that data. It can be a difficult line to draw, but there are situations where it's worth just ripping off the band aide and saying, "if a site is not being a good steward of its community, then the site doesn't get to keep using that community's stuff as a way to attract users to the site."
Are you speaking for everyone deleting their content? I would bet that _most_ of the people doing this are not moving it to another site, but just deleting it forever.
I'm happy to see it, but it's a little surprising (and even frustrating) that this ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back. Reddit has deserved this for a very, very long time for more serious abominations than trying to monetize the site.
I do the same on Reddit and similar sites (including HN), though I never delete any comments, just the accounts. I've become increasingly uneasy about leaving a digital trail, especially as there are increasingly advanced techniques to correlate accounts via stylometry.
For Reddit specifically, if I needed to, I would look up old comments in Pushshift if I could remember enough information to locate them - keywords, approximate date, subreddit, username. It's somewhat annoying that this service no longer exists. Though there are dumps, and backups of those dumps, so hopefully someone will release a similar search tool for these, eventually. Perhaps also including the data scraped by Archive Team. Maybe I'll have a crack at it myself as a side project.
HN doesn't allow you to delete comments anyway. You can try emailing dang and he'll give you some excuse about how he doesn't need to care about GDPR and data protection laws.
If you simply delete your account, the comments live on but are anonymized. The username is [deleted].
It's a lot easier than deleting all your comments before deleting the account, and as others have said, it preserves the conversation for future people.
I'd much rather learn what a bunch of deleted accounts thought about in a thread from 10 years ago than getting only a partial conversation.
From what I've read, personal API keys (issued to anyone) will continue to work fine, but apps that expose a way to use arbitrary keys (like in a settings UI, rather than hard-coded at build time) will be deemed in violation of ToS, specifically so that personal keys can't easily be used by the masses as a workaround for apps that have a 1:many dev:user ratio.
If you can build an app (or clone what someone else has built) that contains your key, you can proceed. This is fairly high friction for mobile apps, like building/patching an .apk and side loading it.
I did the same, and reddit actually chain banned ("suspended" as they call it) the remainder of my accounts and started banning any account as I made it, until I made sure to wipe their tracking cookies & switch to a new IP.
I actually like that. It's quite often that I stumble upon an older Reddit thread when searching something specific and the (presumably) valuable comments are just [deleted]. True, people might want to erase some things they said, but it makes Reddit a lot less valuable as a search resource.
I agree. The fear mongering & sending yourself to /dev/null is out of hand. To me a particularly virulent new pattern that is super anti-social. I think most of ya'll are enduringly good humans & we're better as a world with your thoughts shared.
There's so much discussion about deleting yourself. There should be some words online encouraging people not to jump into black holes. I hope people consider & think on the loss that self-deleting causes, when considering.
I think it's rather the other way around. People self-delete comments because they feel they don't dare to be themselves.
The risk is very low but the consequence is high if you get targeted online in various ways (someone has a grudge and doxes you, or you are the target of a social media pile-on)
Not only that, but sensibilities change. Even if you are thoroughly polite and respectful by today's yardstick, you have no idea what is going to be taboo in 20, or 40 years. Think back to some of the things you might have posted to ephemeral BBS systems 20 years ago. Things you said that were innocent then, but might get you fired and canceled today. Euphemisms that were acceptable then and terrible now. When comments are stored permanently, all it takes for a future motivated enemy is to trawl through your 20+ year old posts to find something that shows you're a horrible person by tomorrow's different standards.
I get your point, but looking back over the last 30 years of my commenting on various internet fora (and more than that if we count BBSes), I honestly don't think I've ever said anything then that would upset anyone in that way now.
I can definitely see some shifts happening. I dunno, I see that both ways. No super strong feelings.
In general though I just think the fear is way overblown. The damage to society of everyone selling Fear Uncertainty and Doubt is real & heavy, is a burdensome tone. The damage of so many people jumping into the black hole is real. And most of us are not going to be targeted people, and our transgressions even at their worst online are really nowhere near a real danger to us.
But having an online existence, being part of the written/online universe is a risk. Yes. Opting out & becoming nothing is a very easy available way to get rid of risk.
I still think it's a farce of high degree how much fear are swallowing. I think it's colossally disproportionate to the risk. We also don't get to societally wrestle with questions of grace & mistakes & maturation if we insist on the supreme personal security of having said nothing.
Oh, sure, I agree. I just think they aren't as great as some people think.
> But having an online existence, being part of the written/online universe is a risk.
This is true, and is why I've never used my actual, real-world identity in any online fora. Instead, I have a handful of alternate (but persistent) "personalities".
It's the only way I am OK with saying what I really think about anything. If I were readily identifiable, I wouldn't participate in any public online discussions. The risk is just too great.
I'm torn about this. On one hand I love finding old comments with solutions to my problems, on the other hand it's easy enough to identify an author based on simple word statistics, so deleted your account isn't enough to prevent an old comment to come and bite you in the future.
This works, and I certainly respect your choice to do so, but if we ass start doing this it removes a huge amount of the value from the platform.
For example I just recently went searching for a solution to a problem, and found 3 reddit posts with what must've been solutions because there were "awesome, works great!" responses, but I'll never know what those solutions were because the user had deleted their posts.
I mean, we could all just use Signal with disappearing messages enabled I suppose, that would keep anyone from utilizing "our data"... I fear we'll just doom ourselves to asking the same questions over and over and over and over if we can't build lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge.
> over and over and over and over if we can't build lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge
The lesson here is that it is fundamentally impossible to build lasting repositories of knowledge on a proprietary platform owned by some entity.
The only solutions that can stand the test of time for the long haul are decentralized systems built on open standardized protocols which are not owned by anyone.
True, and I'm all for punishing the platform. When we do so we're also punishing ourselves however. They're losing potential monetary value, we're the ones losing knowledge. (I'm assuming they have full backups and could trivially undo the deletions for purposes such as selling LLM training data, so the amount of harm we're doing them really is only limited to "engagement" numbers)
Much like the SO incident, it just makes me increasingly hesitant to contribute to any future platform where the only method of redress the users have is self-harm. Seem some good suggestions in this thread though, so maybe we can come up with something new.
I have an account that's older than some current reddit users have lived, I've pretty much never deleted anything from it but I plan to replace all comments and threads I've created on that account with something like the following text: "Removed in protest of reddits idiotic 2023-06-30 API rule changes."
Shreddit looks like a good tool for this, just have to tweak it so it doesn't actually remove the data, just replace and leave it.
Would be fun to also build a tool for restoring the content should reddit reverse its idiotic API decision. But why bother doing that when they wont...
I ran this on my user about an hour ago, and all my messages are still on reddit and also libreddit frontends. I wonder if their api is ignoring the user-agent, or there is a very long cache time.
I also open short lived anonymous accounts. I just sign up using a temporary more or less anonymous mail address (lots of sites that offer this), input a bogus birth date to be able to see all posts, recreate my subscriptions and multireddits and I’m good to go for another 6 months.
Reddit has a lot of good info. This is to the credit of the people posting there. But I hate it when good helpful info or part of a conversation that was going to answer my problem becomes a deleted post because Im GoNnA dElEtE aLl My ReDdIt DaTa
Completely disagree. Not archiving/recording everything for eternity has be the de facto modus operandi of the human race since time immemorial.
Reddit had the privilege of hosting user comments, and they squandered the trust they built. Social networks live and die by the good will of their users, creators/users taking back what they made is the consequence of acting in a way that users don't like. Deleting all my comments out of every conversation I had on reddit and destroying all the value is the point, I don't want Reddit to have that value.
> Deleting all my comments out of every conversation I had on reddit and destroying all the value is the point, I don't want Reddit to have that value.
So, "if I can't have it, no one can"? That's something parents typically try to teach toddlers _not_ to do.
Yes, "no one can" means "the uncaring corporation", but it ALSO means "everyone else in the entire world".
> Sure some lost soul could use that tidbit of info, but they'll only have Reddit to blame.
No, reddit isn't making anyone delete all their content. The person deleting all their content is to blame. They could just walk away, but instead, they're purposefully making reddit worse for everyone.
> but instead, they're purposefully making reddit worse for everyone.
Yes, specifically because of Reddit's actions. Specifically because Reddit made decisions that made them no longer want to contribute to the site's success and (incidentally) also because Reddit offers no way at all for people to opt-out of furthering the company's commercial interests and no way at all for people to refuse to reinforce the network effect keeping the site afloat without also damaging the community.
Indeed. This is fine by me and it's great that you can do this in this kind of case. But what's being discussed is people deleting all their posts because they're upset at reddit for their recent policy changes, and that's what I think is not a good thing.
It’s my content. I can do whatever I want with it. I can delete it. I can change it. I can leave it be. It’s not nasty or thoughtless. It’s mine. Who is anyone else to tell me whether I want to take my own content down?
It messes up the threads. Sure, I don't mind. Like, it doesn't make you a bad person. But I would prefer it not being possible at bulk in forums. Maybe, 10 deletes per year if you accidentally write some PI or something.
I like how HN allows deletes for some time. At multiple occasions I have deleted some comment that was flame or stupid after 10s and saved others the trouble of reading it.
It's yours until it becomes a part of conversation, at which point it's no longer just yours.
Just like when you contribute a brick to build a house only to yank it out later on because "it's yours". Yeah, you can do it, but it's a selfish move disrespectful of other contributors.
I save the posts I really care about in my browser bookmarks or copy/paste the valuable contents to a note on my phone. For subs, if I don't resub then I wasn't really interested. Starting a new anon account is a good way to get rid of the cruft in your home feed.
I have gone over to fullquote any comment I make on reddit because of this toxic style. It's not exclusively your comment anymore if you post it to a public place.
Your posts and comments will still be available in the Pushshift dumps. These have been released as torrents, so there are many thousands of copies of these already.
in my experience, its always the current digital trail that gets anybody interested in more sleuthing
and archives on different sites arent used to link to a current digital trail
Like if you were running for political office, nobody is going to start with the archive to try to match to an unknown current user that they further want to link to the candidate. They’ll start with the candidate and try to link to a current username and then maybe extend that to archives of related usernames.
But if you really nuke and start over you’re fine, people just aren’t that motivated. Your own witness protection program.
I wrote this comment a couple years ago, but unless something significant has changed, it still stands.
Be careful. Shreddit does not get rid of all reddit comments, only the ones on your profile. Reddit stores a list of the last 1000 comments and posts you've made to your profile and that list is what Shreddit and 99% of reddit 'deletion' tools use. To truly remove all your comments and posts from reddit, look into reddit-shreddit [0]. Despite the similar name, it is completely different and leverages all your posts and comments from a reddit data request to delete all of your reddit posts and comments. It is infact the only method I have found, except for perhaps a GDPR deletion request, that is truly a complete deletion.
However, this only covers the deletion from reddit itself. There have been periodic reddit archivals ever since it was created. Up to 2015 they were done yearly, ever since they have been done monthly. Since they have always been up for download, all of your reddit data will still be out there, however you can remove your data from the main source of these archives called pushshift. I haven't done it personally but I've seen it said on reddit, you can email the dev of pushshift or dm him on reddit and he will remove your information from his archive.
The seems to use the same API that is going to be changing pricing, so I assume one either will no longer be able to create the free api keys required in step 4 of that app's setup instructions
The Reddit API will still have a free tier after the changes on July 1st which can be used and Shreddit uses the Reddit API too so it will have the same problem.
[^0]: https://github.com/x89/Shreddit