Unpopular opinion: deleting your Reddit account is 100% justified, but mass-scrambling all of your posts and comments with an online tool is worse than leaving them as is
I might get "cancelled" for this, but hear me out:
If you remove your account bad actors won't be able to identify you unless they put in the effort. Reddit staff will revert popular comments and posts to the way they were before the Blackout. Mass-scrambling your posts and comments with a "f*ck Spez", followed by a long chain of "A"s or whatever, annoys people who are just trying to find an answer to something on Reddit, and it doesn't help anybody except the user's feelings.
The preservation of information comes above some moral feeling.
Your opinion?
More to the point, I took it off of reddit, but moved it onto the fediverse. Folks who need that advice I wrote many years ago will still be able to find it, they just have to look elsewhere than reddit for it.
On the other hand, it makes spammy articles from content farms the primary resource to find answers.
And either way, not everybody is doing this, so Reddit retains part of its usability, which still exists, and some portion of people will still use Reddit after the API changes.
I want someone to add a markoff chain generator to a plugin like "So long reddit thanks for all the fish" so that I can properly trash my 225k comments in a way that will break AI crawlers & search engines.
Its sorta funny because I was having a back and forth about how I would like blocking to go both ways where I don't see their stuff but they also do not see my stuff. I have gotten many replies saying, hey, you can't change their feed. But folks removing reddit comments technically are changing folks feeds in the same way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but once you file an EU or California (where Reddit is based) claim, all your comments are deleted regardless of content. Right?
I don't think that's correct. IIRC, it means you have the right to be forgotten--meaning that if you delete your content they can't (legally) restore it. It doesn't mean they'll do the deleting for you; they'll just send you a file of the stuff you have that you can then use to guide the deletion process.
My opinion is that if Reddit was really concerned about the preservation of their data, they would keep their API open and encourage 3rd-party interactions with their platform.
I think scrambling your data is not only justified, it's the correct form of protest.