Please remember that this was exactly the behaviour promoted on Lemmy when the API drama ensued that drove many users with third party apps away from Reddit.
Not really for the comment in the picture, that one is too old, but many users here tried nuking all their comments with various methods. Some got reversed back by Reddit, others remain deleted.
Most of that knowledge was only deleted but not saved in any other way, which is why I have always been negative about this approach.
Yes, exactly. Hardly anyone, if even a single person, tried to make any kind of process for that. But scripts to mass-delete all their account comments or mass-edit them to gibberish popped up like mushrooms.
I don't mind people deleting but you should only do it if you can preserve the content somewhere else.
Most of that knowledge was only deleted but not saved in any other way […]
That was perhaps the saddest part about leaving Reddit. I also opted for the edit-and-delete approach, because I didn't want Reddit to use my posts to train LLMs. But man. Years of trying to be helpful, sometimes really going out of my way to address something properly; gone.
But honestly, I don't know of any alternative. Even if I archived everything, it wouldn't be as accessible to anyone as it used to be on Reddit.
Reddit had (and imo still has) a monopoly on searchable advice from strangers. There's a reason they wanted Reddits data to train LLMs.
There aren't other noses for most things though, unfortunately. The narrow-interest forum of the late 90s is mostly extinct. Virtually all discussion boards condensed into reddit or Discord, and only one of those is actually searchable.
Why would you want to help a parasite
I don't want to help the parasite, but an alternative has to exist before you can push the public toward it. Burning everything down and telling everyone to build their own houses doesn't actually help anything.
This is a bit like the chicken and the egg though. "You have to keep your content on reddit because there's no strong alternative" just ensures there will never be an alternative. If you really want an alternative you can't keep supporting the beast.
If you really want an alternative you can’t keep supporting the beast.
It still has to be done in the right order. A smaller scale version has been ongoing for a few years with gaming wikis: fandom . com used to be the place to collect and find any information you wanted about a game, having supplanted GameFAQs old-school style (and actually acquiring it while it fell apart for other reasons, it's a whole thing). But fandom has been aggressively enshittifying in a lot of ways so many communities abandoned it, either to discord (boo) or wiki.gg (yay). And in their wake, lots of the fandom sites have been intentionally sabotaged to drive engagement to better places.
But! The alternatives were established first because driving people away when there's no second option makes them do something else entirely and they aren't going to come knocking when you're finally ready for guests.
Lemmy is not an actual alternative to reddit. There's fuck-all here unless you like Star Trek, center-left political memes, doomscrolling American politics, or Linux. Sports, gardening, Magic the Gathering, they're all ghost towns. Even the generic gaming community gets like one post per day with ~6 comments (god forbid you want discussion about a specific game). The fediverse does not have the critical mass to support people that are not specifically interested in the fediverse.
(opinion) Burning books is never the right answer.
If we're talking about making sure people can still find the solution you found to some obscure tech problem, all that matters is that it's indexed and findable on a search engine, not how many comments it has
The deleted comment in this screenshot was 8 years old. What are the odds that comments on the Fediverse will still be around in 8 years, outside the databases of AI training companies of course?
34 replies
And asking the same question in a new post results in:
"What worked for me was Product™ — it's not really magic: it's an amazing product! 💯💥
Please remember that this was exactly the behaviour promoted on Lemmy when the API drama ensued that drove many users with third party apps away from Reddit.
Not really for the comment in the picture, that one is too old, but many users here tried nuking all their comments with various methods. Some got reversed back by Reddit, others remain deleted.
Most of that knowledge was only deleted but not saved in any other way, which is why I have always been negative about this approach.
Fuck reddit. They don't deserve to have access to our knowledge.
Could've archived it somewhere else first
Yes, exactly. Hardly anyone, if even a single person, tried to make any kind of process for that. But scripts to mass-delete all their account comments or mass-edit them to gibberish popped up like mushrooms.
I don't mind people deleting but you should only do it if you can preserve the content somewhere else.
Absolutely. Spez made himself a multimillionaire by selling my comments to train AI, he can get fucked.
If you haven't deleted your reddit comments and posts, you should.
Deleting only removes your username, that's why you edit, otherwise the post/comment stays up.
This is what I would do, I would edit w/ a single "." wait a bit and delete all my posts. Pain in the ass bit it works...
That was perhaps the saddest part about leaving Reddit. I also opted for the edit-and-delete approach, because I didn't want Reddit to use my posts to train LLMs. But man. Years of trying to be helpful, sometimes really going out of my way to address something properly; gone.
But honestly, I don't know of any alternative. Even if I archived everything, it wouldn't be as accessible to anyone as it used to be on Reddit.
Reddit had (and imo still has) a monopoly on searchable advice from strangers. There's a reason they wanted Reddits data to train LLMs.
Can't blame people for deleting their reddit comments to prevent them from scraping it all and profiting from it.
To me, it's about making reddit less usable and valuable to users, so they seek answers outside of reddit.
I can, this is cutting off your nose to spite your face. "I'd rather help nobody than help the public and parasites equally" is a very toxic mindset.
This is the internet, there are other noses. Why would you want to help a parasite when you could push the public toward a non-parasitic nose?
There aren't other noses for most things though, unfortunately. The narrow-interest forum of the late 90s is mostly extinct. Virtually all discussion boards condensed into reddit or Discord, and only one of those is actually searchable.
I don't want to help the parasite, but an alternative has to exist before you can push the public toward it. Burning everything down and telling everyone to build their own houses doesn't actually help anything.
This is a bit like the chicken and the egg though. "You have to keep your content on reddit because there's no strong alternative" just ensures there will never be an alternative. If you really want an alternative you can't keep supporting the beast.
It still has to be done in the right order. A smaller scale version has been ongoing for a few years with gaming wikis: fandom . com used to be the place to collect and find any information you wanted about a game, having supplanted GameFAQs old-school style (and actually acquiring it while it fell apart for other reasons, it's a whole thing). But fandom has been aggressively enshittifying in a lot of ways so many communities abandoned it, either to discord (boo) or wiki.gg (yay). And in their wake, lots of the fandom sites have been intentionally sabotaged to drive engagement to better places.
But! The alternatives were established first because driving people away when there's no second option makes them do something else entirely and they aren't going to come knocking when you're finally ready for guests.
Can't make me put em back.
Nah.
Meanwhile the AI trainers get all the deleted content by buying direct from Reddit Inc., so this kind of thing only hinders human readers.
As long as it devalues reddit in the process, its worth it
Not with no alternative it's not.
Lemmy is not an actual alternative to reddit. There's fuck-all here unless you like Star Trek, center-left political memes, doomscrolling American politics, or Linux. Sports, gardening, Magic the Gathering, they're all ghost towns. Even the generic gaming community gets like one post per day with ~6 comments (god forbid you want discussion about a specific game). The fediverse does not have the critical mass to support people that are not specifically interested in the fediverse.
(opinion) Burning books is never the right answer.
If we're talking about making sure people can still find the solution you found to some obscure tech problem, all that matters is that it's indexed and findable on a search engine, not how many comments it has
The deleted comment in this screenshot was 8 years old. What are the odds that comments on the Fediverse will still be around in 8 years, outside the databases of AI training companies of course?
All of mine got edited multiple times before deletion. If they want to tear through iterations by all means.
The sort of task AI is quite good at, ironically.
Their unhinged automated banning methods are only gonna make it worse.
This is why I deleted all my helpful replies
Happened to me like, three days ago. Lol
I forget what it was specifically but had to do with a game I was trying to get working...
This kind of thing has been a problem on forums for years.
"How do I fix this specific problem?"
"NVM worked it out" no explanation
Reddit is now an advertising tool only. A slip land, ruins by orcs, the once lush forests have been usurped for sometime now.
I left a ton of those when I bailed. Fuck them, they don't get to make money off me.
Be evil. Just reply like that to already deleted comments.