Used a script to overwrite old comments to finalize my switch to Lemmy, and got this message from one of the subreddit that i commented.
Yes my intention is to annoy and create awareness. After i delete my account, Reddit is not going to get to keep my pearls of wisdom, or shenanigans. I hope more people edit their old comments to something like [moved to Lemmy].
It's not just corporate reddit though. Consider the time and effort invested in these communities. Obviously I left because I don't want to support reddit (and because their non 3rd party interface is almost unusable), but there are mods of small communities that have put thousands of hours into building up these subs.
Ask Historians is a perfect example of a sub that gets punished by modified comments (and they have been highly supportive of protests). They are so heavily moderated that every comment is 100% on topic and each comment lost makes the hard work they put in less worthwhile. Now each person has a right to delete their own content, but it sucks to write a 3 page essay response with citations only to have the context be removed to spite reddit. The mods and contributors of the subs are suffering too, and at a time when maintaining the community is much harder.
That's the automod for the sub in question. It's not a reddit wide bot in this case.
Of course, it could be that reddit's admins are helping mods make these kinds of reactions. I'd believe that. But the account itself in question (automoderator) doesn't tell us anything about how reddit's admins feel.
It seems odd that they reference way back machine. Almost like they don't have proper backups and take their undelete data from archive.org. Considering how much a shitshow most of reddit is.
I got insta banned from /r/steamdeck when I overwrote a comment. I didn't actually break any sub rules as far as I could tell... I messaged them to thank them for helping to galvanize my decision to vacate the premises
That’s a canned response. I would regularly overwrite and delete my comments but some subs take offense to it for whatever reason. They either don’t get the point or they are trying to gaslight you with “it doesn’t matter anyway” bullshit
/r/History is filled with a bunch of Admin bootlickers anyway, so it wouldn't surprise me if they haven't seen too much forced mod turnover post-blackout.
That's the point... we don't want them accessing our comments on Reddit. Nobody gives a fuck about our comments appearing on some other archive website... What a ridiculous take someone programmed into this bot.
Reminder that just because it came from a mod or admin, doesn't mean they aren't completely and entirely wrong. Whoever programmed this response just objectively wrong here. Sometimes it'll just straight perma ban you instead knowing you're trying to mass delete your posts lol.
There are tools working purely from the browser in Javascript. That's almost impossible for them to block those. The only thing they can do is detect events and react to it.
And then cry when people browse Reddit through archive.org, where they can't display ads.
I remember an article (or maybe it was a comment on an article) from a supposed former reddit dev a couple weeks ago that their database caching for user comments doesn't actually keep track of every comment you make, beyond a certain point older items will be dropped off the list as new ones are added. So for old accounts, not everything will be listed when looking at your comment list, which is how these tools usually work. The comments are all there in the database obviously and can be loaded when opening a page, but the cache for your account only allows X number of items to be referenced with old items dropping off as new ones are added. When you go to your account comment list it just looks up that cached reference list, it doesn't actually search the database for everything. So on an old account it will have a lot missing because things have fallen off that reference list. Wish I could find that article of comment now to reference though.
IIRC, it’s 1,000 comments. But, I cleaned my accounts regularly and switched to new alts every six months, so I just need to overwrite ~50 comments and a couple of posts made since the start of June.
It’s a tiny bit laborious but doable.
Unfortunately, for folks who waited to overwrite and wipe until after the API changes, I haven’t seen any mass-delete tools that are still working.
Even if there are alternative ways to see the content of the comments, making it more difficult to access that content still does something and isn't pointless. The average person isn't going to go through the trouble of checking the wayback machine or some other external archive, or download any add-ons or what have you to undelete or unedit comments. Not unless they already know that the comment said something they're interested in enough to put in that extra effort, which is going to be a pretty small selection of people who might but probably won't look into your comments unprompted to begin with anyway.
I think it is worth it to save the content on reddit. I don't think it is worth it to save reddit. That's why I've joined the ArchiveTeam's effort, so you can safely delete and overwrite you posts and comments.
I haven't been able to interact with any of my comments or posts via my user profile on Reddit for the last 2 weeks. If I manual search for them and browse to it I can then edit or delete it otherwise its all basically locked content
I did the same before also deleting the comments and posts and some of the subreddits perm banned my user. I deleted the user a few days later anyway so no loss.
There’s no Reddit without users. And archive sites don’t allow Reddit to profit from ads. The information will still be out there somewhere if someone wants to read your old posts badly enough, but Reddit won’t profit from your contributions - which is exactly what they should expect after showing their utter disregard for the people who made them money.
> There’s no Reddit without users. And archive sites don’t allow Reddit to profit from ads.
And? Do you really think enough users will move to Lemmy that significantly hurts Reddit?
> The information will still be out there somewhere if someone wants to read your old posts badly enough, but Reddit won’t profit from your contributions
They'll profit from somebody else's contributions, and they can easily revert any deletions made by OP.