Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn’t planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that’s a bit concerning. There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.
If you live in the EU at least, I’m pretty sure much of this outright evil stuff Reddit is doing is illegal. If you want to delete your account and comments, they have to let you.
I find it very funny to think of how aggressively Reddit was banning people, particularly back in 2016. And how algorithmic they got in censoring and shadowbanning certain comments and accounts.
But now that real human interactions are more valuable than gold, they’re trying to reverse it all again.
I know there are some databases of all Reddit comments prior to… maybe 2015? I forget. Would be cool to port them into an open source clone that isn’t profiting off them, just for the times comments were really useful, like solving a tech issue only a couple people had ever documented.
At one time, Reddit (or at least the core server) was open source. Statistically, it’s relatively likely that someone, somewhere forked and is maintaining that code for their own purposes to this day, but I’m not actively aware of any examples.
If someone has been maintaining a fork, I’d love to see the old comment database imported into it and made available, though I don’t know offhand what license either the code or the comments were released under.
A FOSS Reddit, without the chaos that took over America during the presidential administration installed in 2016, and branching from there, would be an interesting point of diversion to say the least.
Edit: quickie DDG search found me one fork archived in 2023 and a further form updated a year or so ago. That’s recent enough the damn thing just might build with a little work.
2023 fork of open source reddit
I’m sure there are others…
What happens if you create a fake community that only posts fake ai posts? Who is gonna ban you? It’s a genuine question
Nothing, because that doesn’t cost Reddit short term money so they don’t care?
But you can fill up reddit with the most insane shit and they will train AI on it, both reddit and google.
The fact that they are restoring valuable comments and posts means that they need them. But what if the most knowledgeable people on the platform go crazy? It is illegal to conspire against companies?
I don’t think that could be done at a scale that matters, because it doesn’t make you any money.
TBH the bigger threat is the corporate bots that already post in “human” subs. They’re destroying the site already, but Reddit doesn’t really care about that either, lol.
Yea, true probably…it would have been fun tho.
This is basically what Subreddit Simulator did for years.
Every time this gets brought up, I go back to a thread where my most popular comment was (since I no longer have an account to check back on and it’s the only one I know for sure I can find). To this day, it luckily still remains deleted. If it does get restored, I wonder if it becomes the original comment or the generic [deleted in protest of the Reddit API change] or whatever I set them to be edited to before deletion.
Just checked. Mine still say this:
Comment redacted in protest against Reddit’s deranged attacks against third party apps, the community, and common sense.
See ya’ll in Lemmy or Kbin once this embarrassment of a site is done enshittifying itself out of existence.
Monetize this, u/spez, you greedy little pigboy. 🖕
(I edited them manually, though, so maybe it’s that…)
I had a similar issue. I had probably two million comment karma spread across about a dozen accounts. My first account was quickly auto-banned from several subreddits as soon as I started editing old comments. Those pro-spez mods had seen what people were doing during the exodus, and set the automod to ban those who tried.
Then I did the same with my second, third, fourth, etc accounts. All of those were immediately site banned for ban evasion, because I was interacting with subs my first account had just been banned in. So none of the edits on those later accounts were pushed through.
Reddit later un-banned those accounts, and all of my old comments were visible again. Likely to make the old comments show up.
I edited and deleted my comments, and then got banned. I figure they’re not going to resurrect potentially tainted comments for training AIs.
I think the smarter thing would’ve been to start posting AI generated content
Instead of deleting everything, edit it to sometime else. Quick brown fox that shit.
That’s what the plugin they used did.
But all at once in a way that’s obviously a bot. Just do one comment every now and then and you don’t flag it that way.
This sounds illegal
I’ve been saying this from the start:
Any basic level competency backend team has change history on comments. Crack whatever jokes you like about Reddit but they at least have “basic level competency”
It’s trivial for them to build some filters to detect mass changes and just fuckin roll them back.
If you post ANYTHING on ANY server you don’t own: it’s out there. For ever.
https://media1.tenor.com/m/OUzcn0WrxFEAAAAC/sandlot-forever.gif
I always assumed keeping a change history for comments would be cost prohibitive. I mean there are millions of comments and God knows how many changes.
But apparently it’s not a problem to keep versions of them. It doesn’t blow up the database?
So they keep the change logs. Just don’t provide them for the users’ benefit.
Sounds like what everyone else in all the spaces, does.
If you’re storing change deltas rather than whole copies of comments, the changes for all of Reddit should be far smaller than the comments for all of Reddit.
Even storing full comments isn’t much more storage. Just consider it as another random comment from someone else. Doubt most people edit their comments so 95% of comments only have 1 copy. Hell they used (maybe still do) ignore edits in the first 5 min or something likely so people could fix typos/formatting before they start storing history separately.
Storage is cheap. Losing valuable data is expensive
Each change is less costly to store than each comment, and the system processes millions of comments per day.
I learned this like 10 years ago at least
That’s pretty fuckin cool
Yep. I just deleted my top comments and deleted the account. I wasn’t a high fluting karma whore, but it was 15 years worth. I still open reddit accidentally often, and that site is for sure going for the generic social media route. Such a shame.
I just checked and Reddit did the same with my account. I spent hours editing and ultimately deleting my posts and comments, and the Spez Gestapo just undeleted years worth of content. I’m going to go through them again and this time I’ll leave the gibberish.
does this happen to people that deleted their account as well?
Yep. I overwrote all my content and deleted my account, and the criminal enterprise known as Reddit violated COPPA by restoring it all, and now that the account is deleted, I can’t get back in to try again.
Yuck that’s horrible
I just only did the first step: replace all I had written with random gibberish. And then I did nothing. Just left it there. And the gibberish is still there. Mission accomplished. One of the goals of this method was to feed KI with Nonsense. Obviously I wasn’t the only person who did so. And it looks like it has worked.
That may be worthwhile… But very time consuming.
Same thing like you did. The difference is I only edited the content and then I just left it. Deleting everything leads to reddit undeleting it. Leaving the Nonsense there did not trigger their alarm.
Good to know!
I’ve been doing the same thing, went back to read it now, and I have to admit I had a good time. Even though it took time to manually turn my comments into gibberish, it gave some hilarious results!
Actually using AI gibberish for this might be the best strategy of all, since Reddit seems hell bent on making money with AI training and feeding AI generated text into AI training has been shown to yield increasingly worse results over time. So you make the product Reddit is selling less attractive.
