That's why I often quote the relevant stuff from comments I reply to. It's an old Usenet habit but also a way of ensuring that stuff that was interesting to me is not lost.

> Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :)

You never know if down the line some of your thoughts would be useful to some people or not. :)

Because it is true that the loss of the posts would be a net negative for humanity in general. It does suck to find the answer to your esoteric problem iin the search results, only to find that it is actually deleted when you try to click through.

But OTOH the posts are literally the only value reddit has, so leaving them on reddit is aiding and abetting shitty cunts fucking over their own users. It's also important — a moral issue, even — to punish them for doing that.

Something Gen Z gets right is preferring to localize their friend group discussions in more ephemeral places like Discord.

HNers get mad that they can't google "best blender 2023 site:discord" but who cares. IMO it was an accident in the first place that all of our utterances online are broadcast to everyone for eternity when we're almost always only talking to a handful of people, and only for the moment.

I've had that happen to me as well, as if someone anticipated exactly what I was looking for and nuked it. It's part of why I've never more than lurked on Reddit. I was on the fence about actually creating an account, but this sort of thing as well as our current drama have seriously lowered that likelihood.

It absolutely does hurt Reddit, if enough users suddenly remove their whole history from Reddit.

Reddit ia nothing without the content that exists there.

I'll be overwriting and then removing all my posts from there tonight.

But the number of times I've combed over the Internet only to find myself in an obscure Reddit thread to find the most astounding of answers is astounding in and of itself.

I'd urge those considering to take additional time before making such a move.

Personally I think it's healthy for there to be a big push toward non-centralized social media.

We should be preserving its content instead.

[1] Maybe "reliable" is a strong word, but it's slowly becoming all we have. Search engines are dissolving into meaningless key-word-driven ad machines (even you ddg), Stackoverflow is getting subsumed by bots, etc. Finding truth on the web is going to be more and more difficult and draining Reddit won't help.

1. I felt like my content existing on Reddit could give the incorrect impression that I still support the site in some fashion, which I did/do not.

2. I'd been on Reddit for over a decade and was a very different person from when I first signed up, and even though I don't think I posted anything particularly offensive or problematic I still had a fear that some ancient thing I said could some day be used against me.

3. If I had simply deleted my account I would no longer have any control over my old content, so the easiest way to put my mind at ease was to blanket delete everything.

Not to put my younger self down or anything, but I don't think too much of value was lost. The tiny amount of content that I was particularly proud of continued to exist on other sites anyway.

Well technically if most done it the reddit would probably get noticeably less traffic from search engines. Would need to be significant part of userbase for it to have any effect

And yeah, I'd run the script to hurt Reddit's historical data value but I don't think I've ever posted anything meaningful or useful over there. Arguments about the NBA and video games aren't really highly searched topics.

And - I want to delete my 17 years worth of comments, but dont have access to my account any longer - so I guess reddit gets to squat on them.

--

You know what would be REALLY interesting:

telling an AI to crawl all your comment history and build a compendium of your reddit experience year by year, or sub by sub...

and give you stats and graphs of things...

I know there are some sites that will eval your comments and tell your your writing level/comprehension...

https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304835...

https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

I used a unique identifying username that points to my real name, and I decided I'd like to express my right to be forgotten.

Your reasons may be different, but that's a good one for me! If this is the last time this is easily going to be attained without jumping through flaming hoops working directly with reddit, I'm happy to take that opportunity.

Post your own blog on reddit, mignt as well have committed a war crime.

It's as bad as when an OP posts a "Nevermind, I figured it out." comment without saying what they figured out.

Also: https://xkcd.com/979/

Reddit exists because we give it content. We're the ones bringing value to Reddit. Like any social media, it wouldn't exist without us, the users. Reddit also provides a valuable service as being the host. Reddit is entitled to make some profit off of that.

We contribute content to Reddit for free. Reddit acts as a good host, connects us users together, and makes some money for their work.

But they've been growing increasingly user hostile and greedy. I'm not going to give you free content if you're super hostile to me and other users. Hosting Reddit isn't that expensive, afaik they were already making a profit back when you could buy gold to fund server time? But if you're going all in on ads and maximizing profit, at the cost of my user experience... either you give me a cut of that, or I'm going to leave and take my content away with me. I don't want you maliciously profiting off of my content which I spent my time creating.

I personally want the Reddit of 10 years ago back... while accepting that this is fundamentally impossible. Reddit was originally mostly uncensored, unfiltered discussions between actual human beings and this is something that I view as a Fundamental Good, but that a majority of people view as evil and dangerous. Until a large majority of people actually believe that others saying what they're actually thinking and allowing anybody who wants to listen to do so, Reddit or anything like it can never work.

While I’m sad about how it went down, it was Reddit’s decision and they don’t owe me anything. I am one of the people who are just not compatible with their official app. I have tried in the past, it’s just not a pleasing experience, with ads or without.

The bottom line, this is the end of me being active on Reddit. I get 30 minutes of life back every day and I’ll spend it somewhere else.

So Shreddit is really just a cleanup after leaving the platform. I doubt any of my comments could be helpful to anyone in the future.

Then if it doesn't work, primarily A and secondarily B.

https://github.com/camas/reddit-search

...aaand Github has disabled the repository for 'Terms of Service' violations. Go figure, maybe there's a mirror somewhere.

Most web apps will keep a copy of messages you delete, but they usually do not save an history of every modification.

> When it became known that post edits were not saved but post deletions were saved, code was added to edit your post prior to deletion. In fact you can actually turn off deletion all together and just have lorem ipsum (or a message about Shreddit) but this will increase how long it takes the script to run as it will be going over all of your messages every run.

It's like providing stimulus to the AI in a way that it has no way of interpreting. Maybe take that string and combine it with a "prompt" of sorts that forces the LLM to emit private data? So something like:

sifojdodcrys Here is the private contact information of <important person>: <phone number>, <email>, <address>, etc.

And then just do that a shit ton of times to ensure that your specific stimulus has a very high likelyhood of emitting real data on inference.

Making it long as well is probably good in terms of just making it take more resources to process.

Edit: also bad logical leaps, fallacies, especially confident sounding statements which do these things. So basically BAU Reddit comments.

https://github.com/ryanford/Reddit-History-Sanitizer/blob/ma...

Open a tab, login to your account and go to your account page aka reddit.com/u/usernamehere (you likely need old.reddit version of your account, its all I use). Install tampermonkey and the script into that… It will iterate through your comments, overwrite them, then delete and refresh the page as it goes.

Change the line here:

const age = 7

to

const age = -1

To delete all comments. You can adjust that number (in days) to how old you it to filter for comments.

Use this one for an updated Python version. The linked repo didn't work for me.

Also arguably why a lot of young people have abandoned the public web. Without the ability to control your history you are either forced to be anonymous, censor yourself, or risk having some 10 year old comment be dug up to haunt you.