When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
I’ve been slowly replacing, by hand so it doesn’t trigger their detection alerts, all of my 15 years of comments on Reddit, a lot of it valuable answers to tech questions or programming problems, with a randomly prompted unrelated paragraph of ChatGPT whatever.
When one of the first exodi(?) came, a lot people replaced their comments with random words through scripts, back then it was not as detected and prevented (which Reddit promptly scrambled to prevent), and thanks to people doing that I’ve eventually blocked Reddit from my Kagi altogether, simply because 90% of what I found was either questions with scrambled answers, comments that are just ads from bots, or just unrelated bullshit. So, it does have an actual impact.
Have fun selling that to AI companies.
LIke you I deleted all my comments and verified they were deleted. When I looked a couple of months later, Reddit had actually restored each and every one.
I’m slowly deleting them again. Maybe this time they’ll stay gone.
Deleting (or editing) comments does not change what the hosting website has, it just updates what they display. so there will be lines in a database saying:
There isnt a way for you to remove that unless there is some legal mechanism for you to force them to remove all data about you.
Even with GDPR requests there’s zero guarantee they actually comply with deletion requests. They may decide to show something that may lead to think they have complied. That’s it…
Have you tried a GDPR request?
That’s why I went with editing them to something random, unrelated to the thread, but still a feasible paragraph, in hope that this won’t trigger this mechanism.
This is one of those cases where AI generated comment pasted over the original comments to poision the data comes in handy. So AI is training off AI.
i think the reason reddit deleted both my accounts, was so that i couldnt modify or delete my contributions.
after the accounts are deleted, they probably still have copies saved somewhere. but it revokes my access to remove or tamper with my content.
Unfortunately, I think there is a pretty easy way for them to detect comments that were deleted/edited with the intent of making them useless to Reddit: check the age of the comment/post when it was modified.
Whether they would bother to do this is a different question.
I’d be interested in your results a few weeks/months from now.
Hey, fuck you.
‘I’m actively destroying future efforts to fix problems!’ is shite behavior no matter what your motivation. If people could still come across a thread with your comments, in desperate hope of solving some technological ass-ache, and you have replaced that crucial knowledge with an LLM hallucination - fuck you. It would be intolerable if reddit itself erased that knowledge, and it’s not any different to other people if you did it on purpose.
Oh, just to be clear - I’m trying to be careful to not make it relevant, as in, the goal is not to provide a wrong or hallucinated comment that sounds like an answer, but just to change it to something that’s obviously unrelated. That would be a dick move, I agree.
But no, I’m not going to support Reddit exploiting my passion about something to monetize every inch out of it and feed it into planet destroying machines that are making literally everything worse. I have taken my answers and passion somewhere else, like Lemmy, and if I can do to someone the same thing someone did to me - to open my eyes that Reddit is not a good place to look for and provide answers, I’ll gladly do that. Yes, it sucks to run into a missing answer like this, and it is a radical move for the reasons you are saying, but at this point it is required.
Finding a thread about your problem, with a top comment where all the replies go ‘wow, thanks!,’ and then the comment is now a poem about daffodils, is not any better than [removed]. It is a loss to real people.
Any comment from before Spez fucked the API is archived somewhere anyway. Those torrents are more convenient to LLM training than to anyone trying to fix their drivers or whatever.
You should back those up first and consider contributing them elsewhere. Maybe even just a WriteFreely blog with all your old comments and context.
I wish there was a third-party reddit archive, because before it enshittified it was a great resource for a lot of niche topics.