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That's me and I have zero fucking regrets. Over 12 years I commented with solutions to tech problems. For a few niche problems, my Reddit answer was the only relevant answer Google returned. I sanitized it all. Fuck Reddit. They don't get to profit from me anymore.
Completely fair to be honest. This was more of a post showing its funny how useless reddit can be without its pissed off users.
I hope you at least provided those answers elsewhere.
Edit: I never said they were obligated to provide the info, but if they were willing to provide it before then I'm sure lots of people who relied on that info would be happy to have an alternative source for the same info, if the person I replied to was willing to provide it again. If not then that's up to them. It's not like I was demanding that they offer it.
Are they obligated to?
Of course not. But that's why deleting your account is a double-edged blade. Yeah, you can fuck over Reddit a little bit by doing this (realistically they probably made less than $1 from any one user's tech solution posts). But the people who really get fucked over by this are users outside of Reddit, looking for answers to their problems.
I'm not saying either option is right or wrong. But there's absolutely a cost incurred in deleting content like that, and the one who ends up paying most of it is not the one who was targeted to begin with.
I think your comparison isn't completely fair - you're comparing the insignificant large scale impact to reddit of one account being removed with the significant impact to the users looking for answers as if it was done at a large scale.
ie. One account being deleted barely hurts reddit, but it also only barely affects "the users" at large. If many people deleted their comments it would hurt the search users at large, but that would also hurt reddit. They are linked.
Think of how much money Reddit could have possibly lost as a result of people deleting their technical posts from the platform, and how much money they likely make in a day. Even if one were to assume that every user deleted their technical posts, I would have to assume that it cost Reddit less than a tenth of a percent of what they earn in a single day to lose those posts, given the scale at which the rest of Reddit operates. Realistically, that type of content is a very, very small portion of what Reddit actually monetizes across their platform.
Now think of how much of a person's day may be spent trying to troubleshoot a technical problem when all the answers have been deleted from the internet.
Who do you think suffers more from this? Reddit with their billions of dollars, or randos on the internet spending their time trying to find deleted knowledge?
Unless the fact that no one can find technical answers there anymore means people gradually stop using reddit. It's a less direct impact to reddit than to users, I'll give you that. But when you're fighting a corporate conglomerate you have only so many tools.
Note this is more than account deletion: this is per-comment deletion. Accounts when deleted do not expunge comments.
This is such a "shoot the messenger" type argument.
It's not the users who deleted their accounts who screwed over other users. It's Reddit taking a toxic and anti-user stance that pushed many users away.
Reddit is the one that's at fault. It's exactly like saying "you screwed over the kids by getting divorced from your abusive mate".
I never said they were obligated to, but it would be nice if people had an alternative to give the traffic to and also it wouldn't be leaving anyone who needs the info in the lurch, if they were willing to put that info elsewhere.
Depends what it was. If it’s programming someone possibly already provided an answer on stack overflow
They aren't obligated to do shit for free
Never said they were. But they were willing to offer the information at some point, would be nice for people who might need it if they provided an alternative source to find the information they'd already been willing to give in the past, if they were still willing to provide it. Hell, they can charge for it if they want, though considering Lemmy's hard on for FOSS, they'd probably get dog piled for it harder than I did in this thread if they did.
How, and be specific here, do you think OP should publish their hundreds of useful comments out of thousands over the past decade plus on Reddit? There is no easy way to move entire threads with context and answers. So your proposal, which sounds reasonable enough, isn't really viable. OP will continue to provide answers here and wherever they choose. If you're upset, blame Reddit, not OP.
I didn't know if they had a dedicated account for it or not, and there are scripts for archiving comments just like there are scripts for deleting them. I'm not blaming the OP of anything, if they don't want to do that then ultimately that's their prerogative.