Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
I find it problematic that Reddit thinks it can just sell all the content it’s users created. I like that people are deleting everything, making the site less useful, but it is sad losing all of that knowledge. I hope it reappears in the fediverse.
Imagine if Wikipedia changed its financial model. That would be a major, major problem.
I stripped years of posts off of r/vans when I realized my submissions were almost always the top results on Google images when searching basic keywords (not gaming the search). I’ve built !vans@lemmy.world here and I’ve been posting my content from reddit here.
The thought of leaving my content on reddit and driving further traffic to that site just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Imagine my surprise hoping to see some sweet converted rides and got sneaks, lol.
I should buy a pair though.
Haha that would occasionally happen on r/vans. Was always great when someone posted an actual van without checking the sub out first.
I love your approach and hope it becomes the model for others. Anyone that contributes a lot should build a community that is not attached to any of the main for profit social media companies.
I was pleasantly surprised to see sneakers instead of vans like the car. I subbed thanks to you. Thank you!
never found this community on reddit, but im glad you’re here, seems like a fun time. /subscribe
Awesome! Happy to have you!
It’s crazy how some of the communications from their CEO has been.
He clearly thinks he owns all the content on the platform and even called the third party app users ‘freeloaders’ when a ton of them were top contributors to the platform.
Stupid me thinking that buying awards for excellent content was the only compensation Reddit needed (along with memberships).
Boy was I wrong. I’m hoping Lemmy World will get awards that we can award others to help offset server costs.
I think the current method is better. You can subscribe / donate to main developers working on Lemmy and assist with their server costs. Donation links are accessible on Lemmy’s github page.
More users should take all their contributions off. Especially if they are informative big posts. Reddit served as a platform that many people trusted, now it’s gone to a for profit model and blindsided all the people that never signed up for that.
He also said the mods - the ones who provide all the unpaid labor to moderate everything posted by unpaid content contributors - act like “landed gentry”. It’s almost like he’s trying to piss everyone off.
In a lot of subs it was like that though, to be fair.
Some mods go around collecting subs like cards. I’ve seen certain subs where the mods didn’t really bother protesting, or even did protests that actually drove traffic and platform engagement (r/awww and r/videos) because the thought of being removed from their positions of power was too much to handle.
These kind of mods felt like they ‘owned’ the subreddit in the same way spez thought he ‘owned’ everything. It was not free labour for them, they loved doing it and controlling content streams. If they were asked to pay money to stay as mod, they probably would.
Sorry if this post offends any of the good mods. If you are more likely to say ‘the sub I moderate’ over ‘my sub’ then you are probably one of the good ones, my statements don’t apply, and the whole ‘landed gentry’ thing is incredibly offensive.
Right? Completely disregarding the fact that all content is user generated and moderated by volunteers. I raged when I saw that statement.
I think the mentality at reddit leadership has changed just about 180° since it started. It’s not just Steve Huffman, although he is leading it.
Originally they were part of building a community, and users were part of that community.
Now they have become an ordinary business, who believe they are providing a service that should not just be sustainable but monetized as much as possible, and users are no longer a real community, but merely users of a service for profit. No different from Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.
But it’s a simple service, not more than a fancy forum, where users provide the content. It’s doubtful the service is valuable enough, to allow drawing out much money on advertising before users go elsewhere. And when the users go, so does the content, which can easily turn into a death spiral.
It’s basically Usenet with nicer formatting :)
This is what stopped me from doing it. I always feel like if I’ve helped make one person’s day a little bit better, then I’ve done my bit as a human.
I know how good it is when you have a really complex, niche, problem and someone gives the answer you exactly needed, and I don’t want to take that away from the public, even though a company I don’t support is profiting off my comments and submissions.
Yeah I feel the same as a big preservationist. I feel that I got value from Reddit before, now I don’t anymore but that doesn’t take away what I benefitted from previously.
So instead I edited my top 30 comments and added something to the effect of “As of Jul 2023 I’m on lemmy kthxbye”.
This is a better solution in my view 👍
I don’t know why your approach didn’t occur to me but that’s a great idea. Deleting all my content would pain me both as someone who has been able to help people with my posts and as a digital anthropologist, but making it known why I’m no longer engaging with the platform while preserving that content is a good balance between disengaging and purging.
When you can’t trust the company not to paywall your contribution or hold it hostage, it’s time to sever ties and do what you can to kill the platform. Every new contribution to Reddit is a further waste of our collective efforts. The sooner the platform dies the sooner contributors move somewhere else where their posts will be in safer hands.
Wikipedia entre database is open for download. It’s under a license which means that anyone may host another Wikipedia clone at any time.
Don’t worry about data from Wikipedia - it should be safe. Totally different beast than Reddit.
Yup, I usually download a snapshot every year or so. It’s more because I feel ways about digital archival, but it’s super convenient to be able to access that information offline as well.
damn isnt your hard drive full by now? Only downloading the text content or also all the other media like images/video/sound files?
Don’t think it’s lost, I think /r/DataHoarders saved a raw copy.
I went and deleted 15 years of reddit comments and posts, editing them before deleting. End of an era for me
Removed by mod
I can’t imagine reading through a full TOS. I know I should be, but damn, I wouldn’t have much time for anything else in life if I read all these ridiculously long TOS that companies put out.
I assume there’s at least someone out there who has a full download of Wikipedia on their computer, ready to go up as soon as the website decides it wants to go to shit.