While I do understand, it's sad to see a lot of past content vanish without a trace. It's damaging to culture, and even though many posts might have been not that important, there will still be some information that is inevitably lost. What would be great, in my opinion, is being able to back posts up to another place, so that they get preserved outside of Reddit.
Honestly is it all that sad? In a way it's beautiful.
Buddhist monks spend weeks or months constructing sand mandalas on the stone floors of a temple, only to sweep it up immediately upon finishing it. They are beautiful works of art, but their real value to the monks lies in the process of their creation. What reason is there to hold on to it? Instead, take the lessons learned and bring those with you, go forth and create new mandalas more exquisite than before.
I just deleted well over 10 million words from my comment history, many things I've read over and over and many I never thought about again. I'm still the same person, in fact I'm stronger for it. No need to hold on to the past.
That's true, and also my mentality. But when I want to fix my PC and my only lead is a post about the issue with a deleted comment followed by "that fixed it, thx!", I don't think I will be as appreciative of this idea. Reddit was a beautiful source of information and it's kinda painful to see all of that going. Nevertheless I've also wiped my profile since most of it was no longer necessary anyway.
There's a sub(?) Here that's doing just that, look up the Reddit archive
In my experience, it doesn't actually delete everything. You might need to make multiple passes to get the really old stuff. My account is VERY old though (almost 18 years. I was an early adopter)
I would rather leave useful information where it is for anyone who needs it to find later. A lot of Reddit is on Archive.org and, like you said, their servers so I don’t really get what this accomplishes.
so I don’t really get what this accomplishes.
It weakens reddit's ability to use that data for their own AI models. That is the reason for the whole api kerfluffle in the first place, there's no other way to block other AIs from crawling the data for content. OpenAI and others likely made tens if not hundreds of millions off the content in reddit in the last few years, and they paid reddit nothing for it. It's got reddit admins and executives really pissed off.
Thing is, Reddit paid me nothing for the content too though. At the end of the day I don't want my content propping up another fascist billionaire social media mogul with an ego problem, not even a little bit. They burned their bridge so I took my toys and left.
If anything it fucks up their SEO.
I am really conflicted on this. I agree in principal that Reddit shouldn't benefit from my years of comments and posts, but I can't count on how many times I have searched for something and found an old Reddit post or comment that was just what I needed.
Most of my Reddit comments or posts are probably not very useful, but some of it might be and I am not against other random people can find and read what I have written through the years. Reddit as a whole is a vast collection of good advice and insight that is valuable to preserve. Sure it might be archived on archive.org but that is hardly searchable for most people.
tried it, but it would only overwrite a portion of my comments. So I used "nuke reddit history" which does the same but it worked better for me. It's a browser extension, not available for firefox (unless you build it yourself from the github repo), chromium browsers only. https://github.com/sr33/ares