Used a script to overwrite old comments to finalize my switch to Lemmy, and got this message from one of the subreddit that i commented.
Yes my intention is to annoy and create awareness. After i delete my account, Reddit is not going to get to keep my pearls of wisdom, or shenanigans. I hope more people edit their old comments to something like [moved to Lemmy].
If it’s entirely pointless… then why is there a bot to stop it?
It’s entirely pointless to stop something that is entirely pointless.
They say it’s pointless because it’s archived on other sites. The point is that Reddit specifically can’t profit off it
It’s not just corporate reddit though. Consider the time and effort invested in these communities. Obviously I left because I don’t want to support reddit (and because their non 3rd party interface is almost unusable), but there are mods of small communities that have put thousands of hours into building up these subs.
Ask Historians is a perfect example of a sub that gets punished by modified comments (and they have been highly supportive of protests). They are so heavily moderated that every comment is 100% on topic and each comment lost makes the hard work they put in less worthwhile. Now each person has a right to delete their own content, but it sucks to write a 3 page essay response with citations only to have the context be removed to spite reddit. The mods and contributors of the subs are suffering too, and at a time when maintaining the community is much harder.
It’s Huffmann’s fault for being a cunt. HE caused this. Could have worked it out with he devs and not lied. Blame him.
The fact that this bot exists at all makes me think this is actually a bigger problem for Reddit than I would have guessed.
Are the automated tools still working? I couldn’t get them to work on the last few weeks of comments in my remaining account.
I remember an article (or maybe it was a comment on an article) from a supposed former reddit dev a couple weeks ago that their database caching for user comments doesn’t actually keep track of every comment you make, beyond a certain point older items will be dropped off the list as new ones are added. So for old accounts, not everything will be listed when looking at your comment list, which is how these tools usually work. The comments are all there in the database obviously and can be loaded when opening a page, but the cache for your account only allows X number of items to be referenced with old items dropping off as new ones are added. When you go to your account comment list it just looks up that cached reference list, it doesn’t actually search the database for everything. So on an old account it will have a lot missing because things have fallen off that reference list. Wish I could find that article of comment now to reference though.
IIRC, it’s 1,000 comments. But, I cleaned my accounts regularly and switched to new alts every six months, so I just need to overwrite ~50 comments and a couple of posts made since the start of June.
It’s a tiny bit laborious but doable.
Unfortunately, for folks who waited to overwrite and wipe until after the API changes, I haven’t seen any mass-delete tools that are still working.
I wrote a simple updater that uses your GDPR request data to drive a browser automation tool (Puppeteer) to update your entire account history. It’s in Dart and should be easy to adapt into other languages https://lemmy.world/post/959507
Bonkers!! I can’t believe how angry so many people are about people switching platforms 🙄
I mean it seems pretty clear to me that it’s not the switching platforms bit that they’re annoyed with.
You’re hurting users more than Reddit, and it’s totally not like Archive.is and the Internet Archive exists
There’s no Reddit without users. And archive sites don’t allow Reddit to profit from ads. The information will still be out there somewhere if someone wants to read your old posts badly enough, but Reddit won’t profit from your contributions - which is exactly what they should expect after showing their utter disregard for the people who made them money.
> There’s no Reddit without users. And archive sites don’t allow Reddit to profit from ads.
And? Do you really think enough users will move to Lemmy that significantly hurts Reddit?
> The information will still be out there somewhere if someone wants to read your old posts badly enough, but Reddit won’t profit from your contributions
They’ll profit from somebody else’s contributions, and they can easily revert any deletions made by OP.
So wait, if they can revert any changes then how are things being harmed?
