Sometimes I think this whole process of deleting content from Reddit in protest hasn’t really worked out for everyone…
Reddit could try not being such a toxic environment to people and maybe they wouldn’t do stuff like this. In this case given that the comment was from 3 years ago, the reason is most likely not because of the API scandal or AI scrapes or reddit going public, but rather some mod or other user was a persistent grade-A asshole to this poster, or started harassing them, or any of innumerable other possible toxic things, and they decided to just take their ball and go home.
I too torched all of my comments on reddit when I left, including the informative ones about niche subjects, and I’m not sorry about it.
This was the point of the protest. Reddit is all over search engine results, especially Google. If people can’t get their answers from a random Reddit search result, the Reddit listings will eventually be deprioritized in favor of other, more reliable sources.
I thought about maybe instead of deleting all my comments and posts I could instead replace them with AI rewrites to poison them for other AIs.
i replaced mine with random gibberish. several times. over the course of a week.
then i deleted them
And then, when someone (after years) comes across the post and sees that someone had the same problem, they can’t solve their problem because the comments were deleted. This is ridiculous.
Eh, I’m biased since I did the same as Gregorum (except I left the replacement text without deleting).
People coming across it later should place the blame where it belongs: Reddit.
Had Reddit not been so disrespectful to the users who made it useful in the first place, then I’d have left my posts/comments up there for posterity. After what they pulled during the API debacle, I absolutely did not want any of my contributions to benefit that company any more.
Sorry for any regular people who got caught in the crossfire, but Reddit made and shat in their own bed.
I downloaded all my comments before I deleted the data, and I’m slowly putting all the stuff that was actually important in places where I have a bit more control over how it’s used (i.e., the fediverse, my own websites, etc). Not a perfect solution, but if Reddit wanted to keep it forever they should have treated us better.
Meh. My comments were not solutions, my comments were either on articles or joke comments or as part of a discussion. You’re deliberately forgetting that reddit is filled with shit posts and pointless slap fights.
I agree with you but you won’t get any points with that around here. Some people here are already of the opinion that if they can get an AI to respond to a question correctly 90% of the time, they don’t need these deleted comments archived anymore. Don’t even know how to argue with someone like that.
Outside of a web scraper, how sure are we that this poisons reddits actual data being sold to ai companies? It seems trivial for them to have an original comment field in the database that’s invisible to users or just use backed up data. Or even an anonymized copy of all all original comments not linked to any account that is solely for AI training.
I overwrote my comments with a message that I was leaving Reddit for Lemmy in protest of the API debacle. I then deleted my account a week later after all the edits were done.
Reddit should not have an information monopoly on these things. We’re deleting the messages so that Reddit’s influence and degree of information control is reduced. If people cannot find answers to some of their obscure problems because of that, then they are acceptable collateral damage.
