Hawne

Reddit does not really have a reputation of fair-play. As you have deleted your account without deleting your data you might find it restored with a dummy handle “for consistency”.

My advice to anyone: if you want to take your data back from reddit you should first edit your posts (to some “lorem ipsum suck fpez” gibberish) then delete them using tools like power delete suite or shreddit.

Then you should keep your account alive and regularly pay reddit a visit just to see if its content hasn’t been restored. If you’re in a country under GDPR regulation you can also ask for a GDPR archive of your data that should cover whatever they have on you including posts and comment. This is a good way of verifying what you deleted was actually deleted and not just “marked as” and yet available.

I have left reddit. As in, I do not engage further than discussing migration issues. But I keep an eye on my account and will do so until I’m sure it’s been thoroughly cleaned up. Account deletion is not yet in order, it might be before they go public because I also want them to fall hard from that.

I’m not sure this data’s worth a lot though, as many users (likely most of them) are using anon or throwaway accounts with none to little link to the rest of their activity. Sure it can be processed for statistics but I don’t think there’s a lot to extract further. Reddit is no facebook where the average joe has its “average joe” account, and I don’t think signing up with a google/apple/whatever account is the most common practice on reddit (or at least with your real, non-portmanteau anon account).

As for archived posts and comments they’re already publicly available on archive sites. Why would anyone buy them?

But what Reddit is putting a price on is access to content generated by its users, not Reddit itself.

Spot on. Spez is short-sighted thinking he can “musk out” of this situation, as reddit is no twitter.

Twitter’s value is on its users: often empty but famous shells moving hot air from tweet to tweet. Reddit’s value was in the content we brought but as soon as we stop feeding the beast it’s just a glorified wayback machine. That is, if we do not delete our past contributions.

A hell of a job. I took the lazy way out and just deleted all of my contributions, and will be GDPRing whatever’s left or restored in a while. New platform, new content, same mind and fingers.

Too late for me I guess, I’ve already deleted all of my user content in order to “deflate” reddit.

But I still have fingers and a few neurons connecting so, onward to new content!

Spez just got muskified.
He was thinking (or more likely, his hubris was babbling): “If Elon can do it, I can do it!” without realizing that reddit is the exact opposite of twitter.

Meanwwhile in the real world, twitter’s value is all about its users (as in, empty but famous shells making some noise) while reddit’s value is in the content its users bring. On reddit the influence isn’t the person but what they bring along, and if they stop bringing it along then reddit’s just a second-hand internet time machine.

Not even talking about users who (like me) have deleted their “lifetime” contribution while keeping their account alive (in order not to find it restored with a dummy handle). Reddit is getting the Thanos treatment, bit by bit.

At least it makes some noise for “normie users” that could have looked the other way and kept business as usual despite stickied posts (“Oh no more technical protest crap, just let me see more cats videos!”). This (more or less) indirect visibility can pique such users’ interest and lead them to assess the situation differently and eventually follow the rabbit further down.

It also acts as a ZAD (Zone to Defend) after the initial blackout protests.

Thank you! I’m not sure it’ll be the same for shreddit as it must be registered as a “script” application on reddit in order to work so I’m guessing it’s using API.

FYI all of these solutions stop working in 10 days 🤣

Wrong. Most solutions (see below) linked here are either proxies or scrubbers-archivers, which mean they are using HTTPS requests to access a web page.
If such solutions really stopped working on July 1st then you wouldn’t be able to access reddit with your browser.

Which could be an interesting side effect.

(About teddit and libreddit: those two are “portmanteau” using varying techniques to obfuscate reddit crap. Teddit is indeed using some “unofficial” API so it may or may not work, and apparently libreddit is proxying requests so it should probably work. It will also depend on their .json use as it is also covered by the new terms.)

How will these tools (power delete, shreddit, redact.dev etc) behave after July 1st? Will users still be able to nuke their content or do they need to hurry tfu before the fatidic date?