[HN Gopher] Shreddit is a Python program to remove all your Redd...
___________________________________________________________________
Shreddit is a Python program to remove all your Reddit comments
Author : wgx
Score : 360 points
Date : 2023-06-09 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| vdfs wrote:
| I bet they don't actually remove posts/comments just flag/hide
| them
| derwiki wrote:
| CCPA Delete Request should actually remove them
| martinohansen wrote:
| I think that'd be illegal for EU citizens at least
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Hard-delete isn't required by GDPR. The data itself just has
| to be made non-identifiable. You don't actually have to
| remove the database records, for instance.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Every (collection of) comments is eventually identifiable
| prepend wrote:
| There's identifiable and sufficiently deidentified to
| meet the legal standard. Removing the userid meets the
| GDPR definition, but I bet you could reidentify based on
| patterns or fingerprints, if you really wanted to.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| OTOH, part of reddit's "value proposition" is as much the
| content moderation (overzealous removal of comments that some
| highly opinionated moderator with too much time on their hands
| happens to disagree with) as it is the content itself - it
| sounds like Shreddit has a way around the hiding, but if Reddit
| turned around and undeleted _every_ deleted comment, Reddit
| would become a very, very different forum (IMHO a better one,
| but Reddit is what Reddit is).
| galdor wrote:
| The trick with online platforms is to edit messages, replacing
| the content with a random string (this script supports both
| ".", a random string or a fixed string of your choosing).
|
| Most web apps will keep a copy of messages you delete, but they
| usually do not save an history of every modification.
| nvr219 wrote:
| 1. Shredding does this edit. 2. I think this is a myth and
| they still keep the original message.
| stickyricky wrote:
| Unfortunately most "web-scale" apps I've worked on are
| basically immutable (aside from retention policies). You just
| keep appending forever because updates are too expensive. So
| more than likely your comment history will exist on Reddit's
| servers but they use a clever "GROUP BY" semantic on read to
| only return the most recent version.
| thebigwinning wrote:
| We are at least raising the cost of them storing and
| sorting through versions then.
| m45t3r wrote:
| From the repo README's:
|
| > 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.
| atum47 wrote:
| I was approached by someone once asking me to write a script to
| delete stuff from reddit, facebook and google plus once. He
| seemed kinda shady and I was not exactly sure what kinda content
| he was trying to delete, so I did not take the gig. Nice to see a
| tool that does that.
| nvr219 wrote:
| I've been running this as a cron job for years. Love it.
| CyberWhiz wrote:
| Thanks for posting this! Hadn't come across it before. Going to
| take down my account similar to others this week -- I was a heavy
| Apollo user.
| techx wrote:
| I use a bookmarklet that works on old.reddit.com for both
| comments and posts, it only removes the current page though
|
| javascript:(function()%7B%2F%2F%20Shreddit%0Alet%20interval%20%3D
| %20setInterval(()%20%3D%3E%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20let%20deleteButton
| s%20%3D%20%24('a.togglebutton%5Bdata-event-action%3D%22delete%22%
| 5D')%3B%0A%20%20%20%20if%20(deleteButtons.length%20%3D%3D%3D%200)
| %20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20clearInterval(interval)%3B%0A%20
| %20%20%20%20%20%20%20if%20(%24('.next-button%20%3E%20a')%5B0%5D)%
| 20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%24('.next-button%20%
| 3E%20a')%5B0%5D.click()%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20
| alert('Restart%20script.')%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%20
| %20%20%20%7D%20else%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20deleteButtons
| %5B0%5D.click()%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20setTimeout(()%20%3D%
| 3E%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%24('span.option.e
| rror.active%20%3E%20a.yes').click()%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20
| %7D%2C%20300)%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%7D%2C%201000)%3B%7D)()%3B
| croutonwagon wrote:
| Here is a sanitizer script that uses nothing but javascript
|
| 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.
| ed312 wrote:
| There are multiple projects to actively crawl and preserve reddit
| posts/comments. I think the old adage still applies: once its on
| the internet, its there forever. In my view a better, more
| sustainable solution is to treat commenters as humans who are
| flawed but grow and change over time. I don't think it is
| reasonable e.g. to take the comments a 13 year old makes during a
| Halo match as indicative of their views (or behaviors) as an
| adult.
| bmitc wrote:
| And just as a note, none of these tools can guarantee that they
| actually delete all of your comments. With Reddit's API,
| there's actually no way to get all comments. There's a limit to
| how far it will go back.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Since this is posted during the controversy, this is not about
| scrubbing your comments from the internet, but just from
| reddit, presumably to stop participating in reddit.
| ed312 wrote:
| Very fair. I wanted to address a more general point. This is
| not the first reddit controversy, and likely won't be the
| last. If this is the "Digg" moment for reddit, I'll leave up
| to Manifold markets :)
| [deleted]
| jackdawipper wrote:
| doubt it works. its 7 years since it was updated.
| thebigwinning wrote:
| It works with a one line fix found in the issues.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| Does this _also_ unlink the comments from your profile?
|
| I see that the README mentions a distinction between edits and
| deletions. But it's not super clear without examining the code.
|
| From what I've seen, only mods can permanently delete comments
| which also removes them from your profile. If you delete a
| comment, then it's still visible in your profile. If you edit a
| comment to be blank, then the blank comment is visible in your
| profile.
| monitron wrote:
| I might be missing the point but I don't plan to do this when I
| leave Reddit later this month. It seems to me like it doesn't
| hurt Reddit (the company) very much, but it can hurt fellow human
| beings quite a bit. I think investors probably care a lot more
| about current engagement numbers than they care about a deep
| trove of old, intact discussions.
|
| Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google results,
| and regularly see threads that are riddled with [deleted]
| comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies along the
| lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!" The answer I
| was looking for was there, but now it's gone.
|
| 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 :)
| tayo42 wrote:
| One of the worst things about reddit communities is how hostile
| they are to content not on reddit. Now so much content is stuck
| on there, owned by a company instead of the by the writer.
|
| Post your own blog on reddit, mignt as well have committed a
| war crime.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > Post your own blog on reddit, mignt as well have committed
| a war crime.
|
| Many subreddits are fine with posting a link to your own
| content, as long as you observe the 10% rule mentioned in the
| Reddit wiki: for every one link to your own content, you
| should be posting 9 links to content you are not affiliated
| with. You should also be participating in the discussions on
| the subreddit instead of just linking and running.
|
| When you see how many e.g. travel subs have been overrun with
| links to people's own YouTube channels, so they can pursue
| the dream of being influencers, it is easy to understand why
| there is little patience for flagrant self-promotion.
| tayo42 wrote:
| ive heard that rule and in hindsight, i think it was a bad
| idea for people to stick with that. 90% is arbitrary to
| start with. what is wrong with self promotion anyway? Its
| no different then ads, which we've mostly accepted. Its at
| least a person that wants to try. Reddit is a link
| aggregator. The average user doesn't run an adblock. We
| have people writing massive reddit posts instead of just
| writing their own blog. why do people do this?
|
| In the case of travel, you make it seem like there is a
| bunch of deep content being posted otherwise. travel sub
| reddits are pretty bad. r/Travel is anyway dominated by
| pictures and low effort posts, for karma I guess? For any
| discussion, if you go off the accepted ideas you'll be met
| with hostility and closed mindedness. travelnopics was made
| and its barely alive. digitalnomad and solotravel are
| filled with escapist fantasy and insecurity posts.
| zem wrote:
| > Its no different then ads, which we've mostly accepted.
|
| I don't know which "we" you're talking about; at the very
| most some users tolerate ads as a thing they can skim
| over while looking for the actual content they want to
| read. having self promotion where the actual content
| should be defeats the entire purpose of the site.
| tayo42 wrote:
| The world of internet users besides the minority that
| blocks ads. Unless you pay for reddit? Exclude those too.
|
| Self promotion isn't evil, idk how people expect anyone
| to share content they create other wise.
|
| Reddit has up and down votes, if the content isn't good,
| no matter the poster it doesn't get up voted. Bad content
| sorts it self out
| veidr wrote:
| I canceled my sub to that website tonight, too. But I wish this
| could edit the posts to show something like "Post removed
| because Reddit proved themselves to be cunts in 2023, but you
| can find it on my blog at fuckspez.com/2789892"
|
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > But I wish this could edit the posts to show something like
| "Post removed because Reddit proved themselves to be cunts in
| 2023, but you can find it on my blog at fuckspez.com/2789892"
|
| https://github.com/x89/Shreddit/blob/master/shreddit.yml.exa.
| ..
| seanw444 wrote:
| It's karma for leaving such a wealth of knowledge on a
| proprietary platform.
| veidr wrote:
| I kind of feel the same way, or at least I used to, by
| default, and in private I ridiculed my friends for being on
| twitter for over a decade, and always referred to it as
| "walmart.com" because it seemed so stupid to me to use a
| corporate-owned site to post your own thoughts and
| whatevers, where you aren't even the customer...
|
| ... _BUT!!!_ ...
|
| ...eventually my own twitter feed was fucking awesome,
| because that is where the people are, and I followed the
| right mix of 60-70 people. Not too much content, but really
| good. I didn 't post there, but I read it several times a
| week.
|
| Then the oligarch weirdo guy bought it, and began
| disgracing himself and the company in various ways -- one
| of the more generally insignificant (but personally
| repugnant) of them being that his own ignorant (or not?)
| retweeting of Nazi memes and self-owns belittling his own
| disabled employees _etc ETC_ began surfacing in my feed to
| a degree that the programmatic intervention was obvious --
| so I was like, gross, this is disgusting, this is not for
| me (and also: _I was right_ ...)
|
| So I left.
|
| But then I joined Mastodon and tried to follow the same
| people, but not all of them were there. And there were
| hardly any racists or bigots or mysoginists, which you
| wouldn't maybe think I'd miss, but compared to twitter the
| Mastodon feed I got (and still have so far) is like dad
| jokes and "science is real" followed by "yes indeed,
| science is real, look at these interesting new papers" and
| no _sick evisceration of science-denier guy_ because the
| science-denier guy isn 't even there.
|
| And I'm not even saying I am unhappy that the science-
| denier guy isn't allowed on any of the instances my
| instance federates with (or, more likely, doesn't know
| about and has never even heard of Mastodon).
|
| I'm just saying it's boring. So I don't expect most of my
| Twitter people to show up.
|
| And so that is where I have -- belatedly and grudgingly --
| come to accept the value of these corporate cunts and their
| proprietary platforms: they get people to show up.
|
| So I walked back my _fuck you walmart.com or whatever the
| fuck_ stance, one notch. I no longer just whip out my dick
| and piss all over any proprietary platform. I concede there
| _may_ be some bargain to be struck.
|
| If _you_ make it easy enough to participate that _we_ end
| up getting to see Grady Booch and MC Hammer discuss the
| nature of machine consciousness, or the true innovators in
| _whatever the fuck we care about_ have interesting
| discussions... then, well, that 's not nothing.
|
| It even might go on as a win-win for years, even a decade
| or perhaps two.
|
| But there's an implicit balance there, which requires both
| sides to act in good faith. Even though we aren't the
| customer, because your customers buys ads which you
| annoyingly insert into what we're looking at... if it's not
| too much, most of us are maybe OK.
|
| But this probably means that even if these arrangements
| work, the time is always limited.
|
| Because when the corporation whips out _its_ dick and
| pisses all over _us_ then... I mean, I think that means not
| only that the relationship is over, but also fuck you and
| fuck your IPO and we hope you don 't make it, and if we can
| without inconveniencing ourselves too much, we'll torpedo
| that shit, because you fucked us over.
|
| But like I don't think any of that happens in this case
| without the proprietary platform, because there never would
| have been any platform at all.
| T0Bi wrote:
| Power delete suite can edit all your comments. It's what I
| use instead of deleting comments, since deleted comments are
| usually shown on sites that track deletions, but with edits,
| most sites don't save the old data.
|
| https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > doesn't hurt Reddit
|
| 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.
| troyvit wrote:
| > if enough users suddenly remove their whole history from
| Reddit.
|
| Reddit has around 52 million users according to this unknown
| source I dug up[1]. Only the people who care the most about
| this situation will actually delete their posts (especially
| with a python script). What's that, like 500k people? So yeah
| only the "best" data will be removed from Reddit, but that's
| not even the data that makes them money. It's your data,
| remove it, but I think it's an illusion that it'll hurt
| Reddit any.
|
| [1] https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-daily-active-
| users
| throw1230 wrote:
| overwhelming majority of their users are readers. very few
| actually bother to write something, and even fewer have
| something valuable to say. those are the ones with high
| karma and those are the ones that drive traffic to the
| site. so yeah, even if 50k users who drive traffic delete
| and move out, it matters to the site.
| monitron wrote:
| My thinking was that Reddit has always been a "news" site,
| and the majority of what active, ad-consuming users are
| looking at is likely to be content added in the last few
| days. It feels like this is only becoming more true as time
| goes on; modern social networks seem to actively discourage
| looking through the archives. I could be missing something,
| like AI training as someone else pointed out.
| pr0zac wrote:
| I agree the majority of the value is in the current
| activity but theres definitely some in the historical data,
| both for AI training (as you mentioned) and for people
| looking for information on topics that have been discussed
| in the past.
|
| My assumption though is Reddit has already done the math
| regarding the threat of reduced value as a knowledge
| repository from people deleting comments/posts and decided
| the value they lose from pissing people off is smaller than
| what they gain from the changes that everyone is angry
| about.
|
| Especially because they probably keep backups they can pull
| from and (as people have pointed out) historical
| post/comment data is already archived and available all
| over the internet. Legally that data is still the property
| of Reddit so if AI companies want to use it without
| breaking laws they'll need to pay them for it.
| bhaak wrote:
| > Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google
| results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with
| [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies
| along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!"
| The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone.
|
| 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. :)
| tripa wrote:
| >> 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. :)
|
| Well they're always useful to those people training LLMs, for
| one.
| [deleted]
| complianceowl wrote:
| I actually perceived this as helping people who may want to
| remove inappropriate comments that they've made over time. In
| the current age where propagandists from all walks of life dig
| up old comments to cancel people, I think this may be very
| useful for Reddit users.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It won't matter much either; there's services out there that
| hoover up every comment ever posted, keeping a post, comment
| and edit history for forever.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google
| results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with
| [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies
| along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!"
| The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone.
|
| 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.
| monitron wrote:
| haha, my sentiment exactly on how cosmically unfortunate
| those occasions can seem.
|
| If your experience is common, though, you are making an
| excellent counterpoint to mine. If the [deleted] posts stop
| people from becoming active users, that hits 'em right where
| it hurts.
| hk1337 wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/979/
| Siecje wrote:
| Can you keep the comments but remove them from your account so
| they are anonymous?
| freeplay wrote:
| Not truly anonymous but if you just delete your account, the
| comments will remain and the author will be `[deleted]`
| neilv wrote:
| Many times I've gotten an answer from old Reddit threads, but
| many other times (in recent years) the likely answer is in a
| deleted Reddit comment.
|
| 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/
| justinator wrote:
| _> I might be missing the point_
|
| 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.
| ouEight12 wrote:
| Except part of their 'value prop' is "We have this giant trove
| of human created content, and AI companies need to start paying
| us to utilize it when training their models".
| amne wrote:
| perhaps it would be "fun" to replace the comment with a GPT
| summary .. in 10 words or less
| willcipriano wrote:
| Where the adversarial AI people at? Write comments that if
| fed into a model generate nonsense or falsehoods.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Now, I'm not nessesarily advocating for it, but replacing
| all of your content with varying degrees of politically
| incorrect misinformation would be significantly more
| harmful to both Reddit and the GPT bots scraping its
| dataset than merely deleting the information.
|
| Garbage in, garbage out after all.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| I might change most of my comments to various suggestions
| on how AI could enslave and/or torture humanity just to
| see how Eliezer Yudkowsky reacts.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well, if that's the case, they can _easily_ switch to "show
| 'deleted' content" - removing your comments doesn't delete
| them from Reddit's DB.
| [deleted]
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Most deletion apps I've seen also offer the ability to
| redact your comments with nonsense edits before deletion.
| rtkwe wrote:
| That does assume that reddit actually updates the comment
| entry in their backend instead of keeping histories of
| the edits which I'm not sure we've had any insight into.
| pkulak wrote:
| Keeping a history is far more work (and cost!) than
| maintaining a deleted flag. I'm inclined to believe they
| don't keep a history.
| ilyt wrote:
| Actually being able to show history of edits would be a
| nice feature tbh.
| balder1991 wrote:
| That's my assumption too, keeping a history for every
| user increases complexity tenfold, while flagging deleted
| comments seems to be a common practice even in smaller
| companies because it's so simple.
|
| Another user said they tried the data dump GDPR request
| and the comments included deleted comments but only the
| edited version, so I guess this can be verified at least.
| yawnr wrote:
| "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."
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| To add to the other comments, they have confirmed in the
| past they don't keep track of history.
|
| That could have changed, sure, but nothing indicates that
| is the case.
|
| You could also go the GDPR route and request all your data
| be deleted, if you are subject to that. They would be
| forced to comply with that request.
| cinntaile wrote:
| GDPR has exceptions, this would be such an exception that
| doesn't allow you to simply invoke GDPR and get
| everything deleted. They just have to anonymize the
| poster by deleting their signature, avatar, profile,...
| while the posts can stay intact (unless they contain
| personal info).
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > (unless they contain personal info)
|
| Do you think they are going to go through each of your
| comments individually to determine if it contains
| personal info or not? That requires actual time and
| effort, and as an individual user you or your comments
| are _nowhere even remotely in the vicinity_ of important
| enough for that.
|
| It's far easier for them to take the loss and delete
| wholesale.
|
| Do they do this? I don't know, I haven't done it. But it
| certainly could be argued that by them not doing this,
| they are not fully complying with the requirements of a
| GDPR deletion request.
| cinntaile wrote:
| That would destroy their whole value proposition, your
| user generated content is their goldmine. Of course they
| don't have to sift through your thousands of posts to
| find the one that has GDPR info, you'll have to show them
| the post.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| You cannot impose requirements like that as part of the
| deletion process.
|
| It is 100% _not_ the user's responsibility to keep track
| of this information. That is explicitly a requirement of
| the provider and it is fully on them to ensure that a
| deletion request deletes all the personal data. If they
| didn't tag it properly and can't ensure that, then that
| is their problem to solve not yours.
|
| Their value proposition is also _not_ a single user's
| data. It's the entirety of the data set. One user's data
| is nearly worthless, certainly not worth enough to have a
| human review it. Which was my point.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I take it you haven't seen how forums deal with GDPR
| notices? It's exactly how I described. The profile is
| anonymized/emptied and the posts stay.
| vonmoltke wrote:
| Just because a bunch of forums do it that way doesn't
| mean it's correct. When I was at Twitter the Compliance
| team determined that all user-generated content was
| Personal Data under the scope of GDPR. Those forums may
| be getting away with it right now, but they're playing
| with fire. If someone wanted to raise a stink with
| regulators they could be in trouble. I guarantee you if
| Reddit or a site of similar scope tried something like
| that someone would.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I know of two forums in two different EU countries that
| have also consulted with lawyers and determined that it
| was sufficient. I am inclined to give higher weight to
| your opinion simply because Twitter Compliance will have
| access to a larger team of lawyers, do you know if they
| were American lawyers or EU lawyers?
| blibble wrote:
| I did a GDPR request and it showed the content of my
| deleted comments
|
| but if you overwrite first with garbage then delete
| that's what shows up in the dump
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Nice. I wouldn't have expected them to have changed this
| but it's good to see it at least partially confirmed.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Which is how shreddit works, it changes it to garbage
| then deletes it.
| monitron wrote:
| Ah, good point. If this is the case, yeah, shred away. Still
| it's too bad that this greed will make it harder for humans
| to see useful old discussions.
| coldpie wrote:
| It's not greed, it's capitalism. This is the system working
| as it's intended.
| veidr wrote:
| Well, capitalism is about choices. There are a multiple
| choices reddit could make, and there are multiple choices
| reddit users can make.
|
| This is a fairly classic case of "you aren't the
| customer, you're the product", but that isn't the only
| way capitalism works.
|
| This is capitalism _and_ greed _and_ disdain for the
| user.
|
| I don't know if that will kill or materially damage
| reddit, but that combo kills plenty of regular
| businesses. (Salient difference is probably that user !=
| customer, as with many internet businesses.)
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| I'm really not a fan of comments like these. There is
| nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, and 'problems'
| like this could be solved vid regulation.
|
| So no, the problem really is greed, and the extreme
| resistance to regulation in the US.
| [deleted]
| ethanbond wrote:
| Which in this case is both greed and also bad
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's worth remembering, yes - without that we wouldn't
| have had Reddit in the first place.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Maybe we wouldn't have had Reddit, but I was perfectly
| content going to multiple phpBB boards when I was younger
| to discuss my hobbies.
|
| Reddit always felt like a place to take from since it got
| lots of people by being centralized, but not really a
| place to contribute to unless you were contributing to
| the group think aspect of the community.
|
| Communities specifically set up for answering questions
| or R&D were in my opinion the only valuable communities.
| Figuring out things or learning from the huge number of
| users was helpful, but it was never a fun place to just
| talk about any of my interests.
| [deleted]
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Do you think that reddit actually deletes comments when the
| user presses delete? My assumption would be that it just
| sticks up a "do not display" flag in the database. I'm sure
| that there's some influence that GDPR has though.
| fmdragon wrote:
| Some time last year I attempted to make a similar tool. I
| was able to retrieve comments that had been deleted in the
| requests so I suspect that there is a "display flag" of
| sorts that is checked against.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Most of these tools first edit+save the comment with a word
| or single letter overwriting the original text in the db,
| then delete it.
| [deleted]
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| CCPA also has a right to delete clause
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| That's applicable to personal information only.
| Everything a user posts to Reddit that isn't personal
| information, Reddit can use however they want.
|
| > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your
| Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to
| use that Content:
|
| > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the
| Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free,
| perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and
| sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt,
| prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform,
| and display Your Content and any name, username, voice,
| or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in
| all media formats and channels now known or later
| developed anywhere in the world. This license includes
| the right for us to make Your Content available for
| syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by
| other companies, organizations, or individuals who
| partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove
| metadata associated with Your Content, and you
| irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral
| rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| This is probably true, but at least one implication of what
| the program in the title does is edit your existing
| comments with something before marking them as deleted,
| because at some point (this is probably no longer true)
| Reddit did not store your entire comment history.
|
| There are obviously ways to defeat this in analysis, but it
| does make Reddit's job slightly harder if they want to
| leverage that data. It would also probably be interesting
| to also just edit them and not delete them in some cases in
| some randomized way, which would make it even harder to
| reliably tease out good comments from noise.
| namtab00 wrote:
| if(comment.IsSoftDeleted) { write("[deleted]") } else {
| write(comment.Content) }
| ed312 wrote:
| GDPR only applies to EU citizens though. If the data is
| truly valuable, I could imagine some work-arounds as well.
| E.g. maybe each reddit post is automatically a copyright
| work which you immediate give a perpetual license to reddit
| inc. You also automatically transfer copyright ownership to
| reddit inc and they license back your ability to share your
| comment.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| GDPR only protects personal data. If someone requests
| deletion, you could probably keep the comments as long as
| you anonymize them (which Reddit does).
|
| Your comments, including here in HN, are probably already
| covered by a scheme like that where you give the site
| operator an unrestricted license to use them. You can
| remove the association to your identity via GDPR, but to
| take down the content itself you'd need to go through the
| justice system.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| GDPR applies to any company operating in the EU and
| storing the data of users, regardless of the citizenship
| of those users.
| prepend wrote:
| The plug in I use (I think nuke Reddit) overwrites comments
| with random blarg that's realistic sounding text, then
| deletes them.
|
| I'm sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think it
| would be impractical to restore to the correct version at
| scale unless they want to manually review to find the
| "right" version to restore.
|
| I think if they got a specific subpoena for me, they could
| find my comments with a manual investigation, but I expect
| that will never happen as there's no reason for anyone to
| do that.
|
| I just want to remove my content from Reddit.com and make
| it harder if they decide to undelete or otherwise not
| respect my decision.
|
| I'm surprised Reddit still allows edit and undelete and
| expect them to remove the functionality soon.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > But I think it would be impractical to restore to the
| correct version at scale unless they want to manually
| review to find the "right" version to restore.
|
| They could restore all comments a month after
| controversy/blackout events from about a month before
| such events.
|
| That would probably restore the majority as most people
| are deleting/overwriting their comments as a reaction to
| or as a part of these events.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > I'm sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think
| it would be impractical to restore to the correct version
| at scale unless they want to manually review to find the
| "right" version to restore.
|
| If they retain versioning history I'm sure it would be
| easy to identify a mass edit and revert all of those
| edits from the user. If it wasn't easy, for some reason,
| it would probably be easy to revert all edits after, say,
| 2 days of posting.
|
| Given that everything posted to Reddit becomes the
| property of Reddit (okay, perpetually licensed to
| Reddit), I don't know that much legally could be done
| about this. Unless they restored stuff posted while
| under-age, or PII, maybe.
| chongli wrote:
| Just need to update the script to also create new
| comments with random garbage, edit those to other random
| garbage, then delete. Add in some random delays between
| actions, randomize the order of all individual actions,
| and this would make it very difficult for admins to
| separate legitimate activity from script activity.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| If on a new page those new comments would get downvoted
| to oblivion. If on an older page they'd be partially
| identifiable by dint of being on an older page.
|
| But sure, things could be done to make this more
| difficult. It's probably not worthwhile on Reddit's part
| to do anything to stop this, just as it hasn't been too
| worthwhile for websites to evade ad blockers. The number
| of people who mass delete is just too small to matter.
|
| If I worked at Reddit and wanted to do something about it
| though (and was a programmer), I'd add an option under
| individual deleted comments for viewers to click to view
| the comment (and any versions). And possibly add an
| option for viewers to restore a version entirely. This
| would save helpful comments, at least until some jerk
| decided to automate the process and restore everything.
| So maybe the complete restoration is a bad idea.
| chongli wrote:
| _If I worked at Reddit and wanted to do something about
| it though (and was a programmer), I 'd add an option
| under individual deleted comments for viewers to click to
| view the comment (and any versions)._
|
| That could still backfire. Users may be very unhappy that
| their unedited comments are accessible forever. This may
| drive them away from commenting and participating in
| general.
|
| The goal of mass-deleters is to drive down engagement. If
| Reddit makes the entire edit history of each comment
| accessible, then mass deleters could flood that history
| with bogus, AI-generated crap. Although it may still be
| possible to determine which edit was the last real one,
| the effort to do so goes way up, and engagement goes down
| as a result.
| antisthenes wrote:
| There are public data dumps of Reddit comments available all
| the way up to December 2022. And they're only roughly ~2TB
| all together.
|
| There's nothing stopping AI companies from just using those
| instead of paying Reddit $50 million to scrape all of them
| using the API. It would also be 10x-100x quicker to do that
| rather than hammer their API for the comments (the API sucks
| for mass data retrieval)
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Sure, but companies doing that also wouldn't be paying
| Reddit for that data.
|
| The point of shredding comments isn't to hurt the companies
| scraping the data (although that might be a nice side
| effect). Ultimately it's to hurt Reddit.
| realce wrote:
| Where would someone find these?
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=reddit&sor
| t_f...
| realce wrote:
| merci good fellow :)
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| lieto di aiutare l'amico
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| "pay us enough and we'll provide the real upvote numbers and
| not the fake ones" as well
| devsegal wrote:
| Agreed. It's the same for me, along with the value I place on
| my own comments :)
|
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| The best solution would be a tool that copies and then deletes,
| and makes the copy easy to post in your own forum. Best of all
| worlds: no reliance on central authority, and the data is still
| available.
|
| Personally I think it's healthy for there to be a big push
| toward non-centralized social media.
| JohnAaronNelson wrote:
| Much of the value in Reddit isn't "what's happening now" but in
| that trove of information gathered over the last ten years.
| Reddit is a primary source of information because of that
| trove. Engagement numbers will obviously suffer if Reddit drops
| out of search results.
| 16bitvoid wrote:
| To add, it's also the how the information changes over time.
| Often, the same questions get answered and similar topics get
| discussed multiple times over the years for the topics where
| related information doesn't remain static. It's always
| interesting to see how certain things evolve over time.
|
| The only example I can give off the top of my head is
| subreddit for the game No Man's Sky. Its subreddit provides
| the best illustration of how the game has evolved compared to
| anywhere else. Not just in player sentiment, which could be
| gleamed from Steam reviews, but also how aspects of the game
| have changed that are better reflected in pictures and
| discussions than a changelog or release blog. For example,
| you can find screenshots of how the procedural generation of
| planets in the game has changed from 2016 to today,
| interesting bugs that only existed for a specific patch,
| datamined assets that never got used, etc.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Their data is what is valuable to users. Their users is
| what's valuable to the business. Supply and demand my
| friends. If you delete the supply, there's no demand.
| jghn wrote:
| This is cutting off one's nose to spite their face. It's
| not like it'll be replaced by a new trove of historical
| conversations going back over a decade. That's still
| valuable to people not named Reddit.
| gabereiser wrote:
| When you have frostbite, you amputate. Sure there are
| less destructive ways with time but removal of _dead_
| tissue is still required.
| [deleted]
| orangepurple wrote:
| > Supply and demand my friends. If you delete the supply,
| there's no demand.
|
| Not quite. Demand is independent of supply.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| The demand for information and entertainment is
| independent from Reddit supplying it, yes. But if
| everyone used shreddid, this demand could no longer be
| fulfilled on the Reddit platform, thus the demand for
| Reddit would cease.
| some_random wrote:
| I think they mean demand for reddit, which I don't think
| is the typical usage of the word but still makes sense to
| me
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The archetypical older reddit discussion looks like this
| anyway: u/[deleted]: [deleted] +-
| u/[deleted]: [deleted] +- u/[deleted]: [deleted]
| +- u/[deleted]: [deleted] +- u/[deleted]: [removed by
| moderator] +- u/[deleted]: [removed by moderator]
| u/tehpunnyone: lame pun +- u/urmom420: pame lun
| +- u/[deleted]: [deleted] +- u/[deleted]: [removed by
| moderator]
| 83 wrote:
| And you can pretty safely assume all those deleted entries
| reference the size of someones balls or say "This is the
| way".
| blitzar wrote:
| this is the way.
| Nowado wrote:
| It takes quite a bit of forethought to do something that hurts
| users of an app without hurting the owners of the app. The
| experience you're describing is part of the point and it's bad
| for the owners of the app.
| ilyt wrote:
| > I think investors probably care a lot more about current
| engagement numbers than they care about a deep trove of old,
| intact discussions.
|
| 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
| simion314 wrote:
| I agree. People will be hurt by this. I always hate when I find
| the thing I need in google but when I open the page the forum
| was closed or the post was removed.
| bl_valance wrote:
| I second this. I don't see the point of deleting our own stuff,
| it's like burning books from a library of unique books.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Just make sure to take your data with you whatever you do !!
|
| https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304835...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
| troyvit wrote:
| I second this. There are few reliable[1] online sources for
| what now passes as social history, and Reddit is one of them.
| Destroying that history just to hurt a company seems
| antithetical to what the WWW is.
|
| 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.
| bmitc wrote:
| Oh well. People shouldn't feel entitled to other people's data.
| Every conversation ever doesn't need to be recorded for
| eternity.
| pr0zac wrote:
| I'm really sad Reddit murdered Pushshift and as a result
| murdered unddit.com also. It still works to undelete comments
| from before May 1st but doesn't for anything after and because
| future functionality is dead I have to imagine the site isn't
| gonna be up much longer just to provide historical info.
|
| 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.
| HotGarbage wrote:
| Pushshift already scraped your data and it's now floating
| around in torrents and on Archive.org. Someone will make a new
| way to access it without the soon-to-be-IPO'd reddit
| gatekeepers. I say delete it all!
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Honestly, I don't see why we should care that other people
| can't find our comments in the future. That's a lucky side-
| effect of how comments never expire rather than our intent when
| conversing online, and the permanence of our comments also
| causes a lot of problems like accidental oversharing to people
| we were never talking to in the first place.
|
| 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.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > That's a lucky side-effect of how comments never expire
| rather than our intent when conversing online,
|
| A lot of online discussion might be a lot more pleasant if
| people considered the perspective of themselves, or people
| they care about, reading their comments years in the future.
|
| For sites like stackoverflow the intend is clearly to leave a
| lasting record of information, perhaps even more than
| answering the original persons question.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > A lot of online discussion might be a lot more pleasant
| if people considered the perspective of themselves, or
| people they care about, reading their comments years in the
| future.
|
| Or maybe that hasn't worked so well because it's not a sane
| default nor the one we operate in when we converse with
| others on a site like Reddit. For example, I'd like to see
| the argument for why my utterances on a site like Reddit
| need to be online forever and why I should want them to be.
| I can see why that's good for Reddit, but not why I should
| care.
|
| HN doesn't let you delete comments. Yet nobody can even
| respond to my comments in the future. So it's a feature
| that does nothing for me no matter how great my comments
| might be.
| thomasahle wrote:
| It's like writing a blogpost in a conversational format.
| A way for you to share your thoughts with the world. If
| you only want to share them with a single person, a phone
| call would probably be better.
| xfitm3 wrote:
| You sacrifice privacy - societal norms change over time and
| what was once acceptable can no longer be.
| samstave wrote:
| If there are LLMs that trained on all avail /u/ comments - then
| maybe they will live into perpetuity in the AI HiveMind?
|
| 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...
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| I've been using Shreddit to edit and delete my reddit comments at
| 5pm every day.
|
| Couple of reasons:
|
| * Keeps me disinterested from caring about karma and making
| comments all the time (basically keeps me a lurker)
|
| * Prevents me from adding any value to Reddit who I hate as a
| company
|
| * Since I don't leave comments it lessens the time I spend on the
| site
|
| * Once I had my first kid I realized that my discourses online
| were pretty "unkind" and I realized that if my kids looked me up
| as teenagers I'd be pretty embarrassed. I went on a spree of
| removing all traces of myself online and now I just use throwaway
| accounts everywhere.
| semitones wrote:
| And now that you use throwaway accounts, do you continue to be
| unkind?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| I try my best to be constructive now
| remram wrote:
| Wouldn't it be easier to just... not comment? What's the
| benefit of leaving "[deleted]" comments all over, for you or
| anyone else?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Sometimes I need to ask a question on niche communities that
| don't have a Discord or forum
| hackernewds wrote:
| So you get value from the community, and leave a trail of
| confusing deleted comments for the others? What experience
| remains if everyone would do the same - Kant's "categorical
| imperative" would imply this is unethical.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| I don't care about what someone else considers ethical.
| If I'm making Reddit worse it's all good with me
| beerpls wrote:
| That would take will power and fix the problem.
|
| In the modern world we download another app and then feel
| better despite nothing having changed.
| remram wrote:
| Why not an extension that makes the "save" button cancel
| instead?
|
| How can you put effort writing a comment if you know it
| will be deleted before people read it? How can you bear to
| keep your deleter enabled after you just posted a comment
| you thought interesting?
|
| And quite frankly, how do you justify going into other
| people's threads and littering them with useless
| "[deleted]" comments on purpose?
| axblount wrote:
| If you feel that way (not saying you shouldn't), why don't you
| just stop using Reddit?
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| I think once my mobile Reddit client stops working I'll stop
| using it.
| thomasahle wrote:
| Have you considered your kids might actually really want to
| know who their parents were when they were young? Even if it's
| embarrassing to you now, it might one day give them calm to
| know their parent was once an embarrasing teenager like
| everyone else.
| jackdawipper wrote:
| when you find this doesnt work use this:
|
| Go to Chrome install Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) go to RES
| settings panel, set Never Ending Comments (load child comments)
| to on.
|
| install Tampermonkey chrome extension search it for scripts
| install "Better Reddit Delete" script which is spaz version
| updated and improved.
|
| go to old.reddit.com/user/youname/comments there is a button at
| the top of the menu to delete comments and posts (to delete all
| the comments need "never ending comments" set in RES else it will
| just delete the visible page)
|
| (takes a long time, might have to leave it overnight, doesnt exit
| by itself) if it only says it is deleting 25 comments then you
| may have to scroll to the end of the pages to then run the delete
| first. its kind of weird like that. I do it in sets of about 125
| and repeat. but it will show the number it is deleting in total
| greyed out on the screen as it runs.
|
| remove all the extensions when done
|
| **
|
| For Firefox works same method
| nvr219 wrote:
| I would recommend getting this script to work for you so you
| can automate it.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I am a bit conflicted on this, maybe we should first push for
| better archives of this data before we start deleting it?
|
| I often find myself stumbling into reddit when I am searching for
| something so I worry that this would be a big loss.
|
| Idk I guess I am just a bit worried about efforts to send reddit
| a message with how this will impact various information that is
| stuck in comments on reddit.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Does anyone have a quick and easy to use package for
| _downloading_ all your comments and the comments surrounding them
| for context? Last time I looked into it, it was a massive pain
| and I definitely wouldn 't want to just delete and lose
| everything I've written.
| FusionX wrote:
| You can request all your reddit data -
| https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request.
| Tenoke wrote:
| This doesn't download the context and I want the post text
| and the comments surrounding mine at minimum.
| tikkun wrote:
| I tried a few and this one worked best:
| https://github.com/aliparlakci/bulk-downloader-for-reddit
| slrey wrote:
| You can request your personal data with the CCPA or GDPR under
| https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request It does contain
| all your comments, likes, messages, etc. It does not contain
| the surrounding comments but at least a link to the thread.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| When I quit reddit (over irritation at being banned from too
| many subreddits for not aligning properly with the hive mind),
| I used this tool to extract and save all my comments locally
| before manually deleting the lot:
|
| 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.
| Havoc wrote:
| Keep in mind that this might destroy value for other people,
| especially around technical topics
|
| It's a bit like those stack overflows that end with "never mind,
| figured it out" without the actual answer.
|
| I've encountered that multiple times on reddit where people
| scrubbing their history and it breaking the conversation enough
| to be useless
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Strikes/protests generally impact consumer value in short term
| yeah. Is that anti-strike rhetoric?
| Havoc wrote:
| >Is that anti-strike rhetoric?
|
| Its just a fact, not meant as commentary either way on the
| current matter
| maronato wrote:
| I have no numbers to back me up, but my impression is that
| the majority of Reddit's revenue comes from people browsing
| recently submitted posts, where they can inject ads.
|
| Old posts/comments with technical or insightful information
| are surfaced via other search engines, not via browsing, so
| Reddit makes virtually no money from them.
|
| Deleting these posts and comments won't hurt Reddit, only the
| people seeking information.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| it hurts reddit's value prop and is suggested in addition
| to stopping posting new content, not just to cull content
| once it gets old. your worry about old content going away
| should be in proportion to how much new content
| degrades/slows.
| ck2 wrote:
| Wouldn't a better program idea be to copy all your comments to
| another service?
|
| btw is teddit.net a proxy of reddit?
|
| people should have been building clones
| throw2022110401 wrote:
| This uses the API and will stop working when that goes away,
| correct? This presents an interesting dilemma to those of us who
| are planning to leave if the planned changes go through.
| erur wrote:
| There's always "some" interface under the hood you can automate
| on - unless they start requiring captchas for every
| interaction. It might not be as comfy to use as the official
| API but still better than manually deleting hundreds or
| thousands of comments.
| CharlesW wrote:
| That's my understanding. If you wait, you'll probably have to
| do it manually.
| alexvoda wrote:
| Please wait for the ArchiveTeam to finish first.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| How much more do they need to do? 2005-2022 is already
| readily accessible, with the first few months of 2023 also
| being hosted as a separate file[0]. What more is there to
| even do, except for getting these past few months worth of
| content?
|
| [0] https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/
| hoherd wrote:
| I've been using shreddit for years, and even have a fork of it
| with some options that I prefer. You could definitely replicate
| shreddit in selenium or just bs4 or some other crawler. It
| would be fairly easy, and could have identical features.
| shmatt wrote:
| The thing that will surprise me most is if the mods - who spends
| tens of hours a week working for free just for their status
| symbol, will actually remove their accounts and/or shut down
| subreddits for good, instead of 1 or 2 days
|
| Reddit moderation is not a democracy, there is a very small group
| of people who control a large number of the 1 million+ subscriber
| subreddits. They work so hard just for the respect/props, maybe
| they figured out a way to make money off it buy promoting
| corporate posts, who knows
|
| If that happens, it really will be a re-creation of Digg, where
| the power users ending up killing the website by manipulating it
|
| Without subreddits in their full control, what else do they have?
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| What I don't understand is why people think Reddit will let
| them just shut down subs permanently. They'll just remove the
| mods and bring the sub back forcefully if they have to, ride
| the wave of negativity and everyone will forget.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I agree, but I see two possibilities:
|
| * New mods cause controversy. Users are going to be on edge
| and riot about any small thing. Quality deteriorates.
|
| * volunteer mods realize they don't actually have any power.
| People loose interest in propping up Reddit. Mods become paid
| positions.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| This only works if they find replacement mods ready to set up
| all the moderation infrastructure again. Mods use a huge
| amount of 3rd party tooling to automate a lot of the work. If
| the tooling is turned off or even if the most basic automod
| configs are deleted when subreddit goes private, then most
| subs would be overwhelmed by bots and spam within hours if
| not minutes. That or they'd have to pay people to be
| moderators and I can't imagine increasing headcount is
| something they want to do pre IPO.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Reddit didn't provide these tools, so clearly they're not
| concerned with whether good moderation tools exist. The
| lack of them will not prevent them from restoring the
| subreddits.
|
| Subreddit quality doesn't matter. Most of the popular
| subreddits are already horrible.
| bredren wrote:
| I am a mod of r/portland. We use a 3rd party chat app and
| other web applications.
|
| We also have custom tuned automod and other software to
| help out. A lot of the need for these services is because
| Reddit has failed to provide necessary tools in a timely
| way forever.
|
| For example, our sub has been under brigade since the
| national news began focusing on it this past
| administration. The company did nothing for us, not even
| words of support.
|
| The company has spurned volunteer mods long enough they
| have got whatever's coming to them. It isn't just an API
| people are upset about.
|
| Anyway, the software tools for collaboration matter in
| moderation, but even more so it is a huge amount of work to
| keep a sub from going off the rails.
|
| I've seen comments of people thinking it's mostly power
| stuff and there are elements of that at play. But it
| doesn't work day to day. Big subs that aren't moderated
| constantly fall on hard times.
| urmish wrote:
| > sub has been brigaded
|
| > past administration
|
| lol. One trip to Portland is enough to see how
| disconnected the sub's mods are from the reality.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| What I don't understand is why any of you think that any of
| this shit matters.
|
| At all.
|
| What is a couple of days of a few subs shutting down going to
| matter in the grand scheme of things? This is why unions
| aren't run by hobbyists.
| xthetrfd wrote:
| You can bookmark this instead:
| https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
|
| Much easier
| mikrl wrote:
| I wrote a script to replace all of my comments with an offensive
| string padded to the character limit, but I was not sober when I
| wrote it and have no idea where it is now.
| smilbandit wrote:
| i don't use apps other then a broswer for the most part, so not
| that broken up about these api issues. i also don't use reddit as
| much after they removed the .compact templates.
| fnord77 wrote:
| easier just to file a CCPA or GDPR deletion request.
|
| I don't even think they check the geo of the ip you use
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I'm curious how many people will use this to shred their comments
| into racial slurs or other similarly noxious content instead of a
| period or "This comment has been removed by Shreddit. Learn how
| to protect your privacy at <URL>."
| avgcorrection wrote:
| What I don't like about commenting on the 'net is that even if I
| was 100% sure that no one could reliably _find_ me based on my
| comments alone (not counting the metadata), I have no idea if
| that will be the case in five or ten years. (Using analysis like
| writing style and interests to cross-check.) So nuking everything
| once in a while might be a good idea.
| activiation wrote:
| When you get banned, do all your comments disappear?
| pdntspa wrote:
| A thousand curses to whoever wrote and runs this. So much
| valuable information is going to be lost because of greed and
| stupidity.
| dmbche wrote:
| Hey - people are free to do what they want with their stuff.
| You're not entitled to people's comments!
| pdntspa wrote:
| They are, but people acting selfishly as individuals is going
| to destroy a great common resource, and we will all be worse
| off for it.
|
| Truly a tragedy of the commons.
|
| "But I've been fishing this lake my whole life!" Yeah, you
| and everyone else buddy. Now there are no more fish in the
| lake.
|
| Would you burn the library of alexandria just because the
| ehyptian government started charging for access?
| dmbche wrote:
| Oh no - but I've deleted all my comments when I left reddit
| a few years back, just because I don't like having a
| papertrail of comments behind me, which I think is a fair
| use of this tool!
| pdntspa wrote:
| What are you doing commenting on a reddit account
| traceable to other identities?
|
| That's like usernames 101 man.
| dmbche wrote:
| We're all young once! And I'm certain most users are
| traceable. Systematic flaw - guess it should be like
| 4chan.
|
| Edit: I'm also a little overly paranoid and assume that
| it's probably trivial to link anonimised usernamed
| comments to some individual, from times where comments
| are made and connections in subject and style of writing.
| I now assume all interactions that are not encrypted are
| public and not anonymised
| Barrin92 wrote:
| it has nothing to do with greed or stupidity but the right of
| individuals to retain ownership over their own data. We have
| this enshrined as a right in the EU.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten). It's
| very strange to suggest that extracting value from other
| people's information somehow ought to override their privacy or
| control. It's a sort of digital voyeurism.
|
| 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.
| pdntspa wrote:
| The EU massively and hamfistedly overcorrected on its digital
| rights legislation. It is so laughably arrogant to think that
| one could assert control over all their data once it's in the
| public, particularly in an age of youtube-dl and 'right click
| to save as'. And now we have endless fucking cookie popups
| because they didn't have enough backbone to actually ban
| these bad data practices, rather left in a really obnoxious
| loophole for which the whole world must suffer.
|
| Data out in the public cannot be controlled. Period. Full
| stop. Any control you are given is a luxury, which may not
| last. It is very trusting to think that just because
| something disappears off the public web, that it is truly
| gone.
|
| The other problem is that people are wiping their whole
| accounts. It is infuriating to think that a technical thread,
| for example, might be missing the post with the actual
| solution, all because someone thought they were striking back
| against Wall Street or something. I believe very firmly in
| privacy but this is one area where the greater good trumps
| individual concerns.
| junon wrote:
| How about a thousand curses to Reddit for killing their own
| site? Weird apologist nonsense happening on this thread...
| pdntspa wrote:
| Regimes change, but information simply dies. Your perspective
| lacks long-term vision.
|
| This isn't about apologetics, it's about the preservation of
| useful information.
|
| I am still reeling over the loss of discussions on imdb,
| nowhere else could one contextualize any given movie so
| easily.
| cambaceres wrote:
| Great name
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm trying to understand various activist goals regarding Reddit.
| Is it some combination of the following?
|
| (a) Burn down Reddit, as vengeance for their behavior in recent
| years.
|
| (b) Burn down Reddit, to lay the groundwork for a more user-
| friendly alternative.
|
| (c) Temporarily apply pressure on Reddit, especially regarding
| their planned IPO, as a rebuke so they become more user-friendly.
|
| (d) some thing else, and/or some combination of the above
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| For deleting posts/comments:
|
| 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.
| lb4r wrote:
| Isn't it all because of their plans to charge for their API?
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| That's just the latest thing they've done, the straw that
| broke the camel's back. They started down the path of
| enshittification a long time ago. With the new website and
| new mobile apps.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree it's probably been building.
|
| For me, perhaps others, I've been waiting for a good
| excuse to GTFO because I know it's been circling the
| drain (comments-wise if in no other way) and that I've
| had an unhealthy addiction to it.
| lb4r wrote:
| Interesting. I've personally found those changes very
| annoying as well (I've never used the mobile app though),
| but I never even observed a glimpse of some sort of
| public lust for boycott after those changes.
|
| From my perspective, this doesn't seem like a straw, but
| rather a rock, that broke the camel's back.
| splatcollision wrote:
| Upvote for correct use of "enshittification"
| slingnow wrote:
| Unfortunately as people move away from Reddit, invariably
| some number of them will end up here and we'll end up
| flooded with even more useless Reddit comments like this.
| Macha wrote:
| However, the person you're replying to has an account
| from about 5% into the lifespan of this site, so can
| hardly be accused of being a recent reddit migrant.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| I believe it is primarily (a) which automatically leads to (b).
| While (c) is a part of (a) itself.
| omoikane wrote:
| I think it's more about vengeance. If it were not for
| vengeance, it seems healthier to just quietly move on and
| completely forget about the thing they hate. By deleting data
| and being vocal it, they are hoping to find like minded users
| to amplify damage. Maybe it's schadenfreude.
| brk wrote:
| I think in general there is a lot of anger or frustration
| around the fact that Reddit's primary trove of value is content
| that has been created, posted, and moderated for free by their
| community. Despite this, Reddit trends more and more user
| hostile every year, with rules, redesigns, and other
| limitations that often come across as attempting to punish or
| hinder the very group that is the core of their value. While I
| doubt the majority of the user base takes issue with Reddit
| wanting to be profitable, the potential IPO is coming across
| very much as a rug pull of sorts to those users.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > lay the groundwork for a more user-friendly alternative
|
| 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.
| nvr219 wrote:
| The parts of Reddit where I hang out seem pretty uncensored
| and unfiltered... And I've been on Reddit for 11 years. It
| doesn't feel like it's gotten worse anyway.
| pydry wrote:
| As soon as a popularity threshold gets reached you start
| getting lazy corporate memes (I think I saw coke vs mentos
| with ludicrously high number of upvotes in a programming
| subreddit recently), power hungry abusive mods and comments
| sections that look suspiciously like a marketing agency
| bought a reddit vote machine gun.
|
| There are some exceptions which are run by some seriously
| underrated mods, but for some reason the exceptions seem to
| be protesting the loudest. If I were advance publications
| I'd be looking for somebody to fire.
| jackdawipper wrote:
| [flagged]
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| (e) People spearheading this initiative are terminally online
| Reddit addicts that finally feel like they can achieve
| something in their life by "sticking it to the man", without
| realizing that they can't survive without "the man".
| 404mm wrote:
| I can share my angle.
|
| 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.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Mostly, C.
|
| Then if it doesn't work, primarily A and secondarily B.
| pid_0 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| egberts1 wrote:
| Missed it by this much.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiv...
| 7373737373 wrote:
| As much as _that_ sucks, let us keep it mind that on HN, this
| wouldn 't even be possible
| mft_ wrote:
| Random thought: if someone's goal was to replace their old
| comments with text designed be _directly adversarial_ to future
| usage in training machine learning algorithms (therefore not just
| removing their comments ' incremental value, but instead creating
| negative value) what text should they use?
| Mockapapella wrote:
| Something like this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36242914
|
| 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.
| junon wrote:
| This has been patched by GPT and will likely be patched
| quickly by other models.
| captainbland wrote:
| Just anything factually incorrect, grammatically incorrect. ML
| operates on the principle of garbage in->garbage out.
|
| 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.
| jms703 wrote:
| Please don't hurt the community over this.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| The rust version is more current:
|
| https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
| wussboy wrote:
| https://github.com/ksurl/Shreddit
|
| Use this one for an updated Python version. The linked repo
| didn't work for me.
| keybpo wrote:
| I just use this javascript, even allows you to back-up content:
| https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
| SirMaster wrote:
| I understand why people want this, but I've actually gone on
| quite a few threads where someone resolved a problem I'm googling
| and the answer says, "This comment was deleted by Shreddit"
|
| This probably hurts the people more than the company.
| ant6n wrote:
| ArchiveTeam wants to archive all of reddit, shreddit wants to
| shred it. Interesting juxtaposition.
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