The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
So I haven’t been on Reddit since the blackout, so I don’t know what the sentiment there is. I used the official app, so you can’t accuse me of not being sympathetic for the cause.
But I have been creating content for years, many of which contained helpful solutions for IT problems in niche areas I took interest in. Now all this content is unhelpful because the sub is private or the original question context was deleted. This really bums me out that all this energy and effort has gone to waste.
The ‘npm left-pad incident’ is a case where a developer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of open source library which many other libraries were dependent on.
There is something to be said about abandoning and moving on without burning the bridges in the process, rendering not only your content as useless, but other people’s as well
You could try sending a modmail to see if the mod will give you access to the sub so you can see your own content, or send you a copy of a specific post or comment.
One thing to note is that this happened all the time on reddit as folks either deleted their question and throwaway account as soon as they got their answer. Other times folks would ask with their main account but used something like shreddit once a month. So this isn’t exactly new to the protest.
When I move my content to its new home, I usually avoid naming the questioner and I briefly summarize their question/responses. This way the content has the added context to be understandable.
If the post is from Feb of this year or older and you forgot the context but want to save the content, you can search for the post in the pushshift torrents - if it was deleted as part of the protest then the pushshift torrent will have the original content in it and you can restore the context that way.
Additional effort is required to do what I do, but the result is that the effort has not gone to waste, instead folks who want it can view it on the fediverse.
From my POV reddit burned those bridges.
It’s not useless, it now serves to move people away from reddit. Remember, with reddit you never know when you will be permabanned - it seems to happen entirely at random nowadays.
Mostly I’ve only seen three categories of this.
A throwaway or an account not logged into for a while. The owner if still alive probably doesn’t have the access to move it away anymore anyways.
Content that is still present under “[deleted]” - person got hit by a 1k limit or something and missed deleting that before deleting the account.
Content from a mod, who has’t moved off yet as they’re trying to hold onto the sub for the protest.
I figure I’m better off moving my content with context anyways, since that prevents the person in 1. or 3. from coming back and confusing the context.
The other thing I do when commenting is quoting extensively, that way the context is clear from my own comments.