Do the advantages of deleting one’s entire Reddit history outweigh the disadvantages?
I have previously nuked my first Reddit account because it felt satisfactory to be completely detached from a platform one considers unethical/bad. Though, I have garnered quite some history on a second account—because Duty Calls*, of course—and I’m considering doing the same.
However, I don’t want to do it impulsively. I think I might be blind to some disadvantages. What do you think?
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Thesis: Nuking your reddit account is good for your mental health
Antithesis: If everyone nuked their reddit accounts, a lot of invaluable information (especially in niche communities) would be lost, and this would primarily hurt average people and not reddit as a corporation
Synthesis: Nuking all reddit accounts is good for society’s health. Reddit is a trash website. In the short-term it will hurt, but long-term we are better off moving these communities to decentralized platforms. There are ways to archive the important information from reddit. Reddit thrives off the free contributions of countless users who are paid nothing, and reddit claims ownership and monetizes all content freely published to it. If you don’t like reddit, simply stop posting to it, no matter how juicy the bait
Deleting posts is basically pointless - reddit keeps everything you delete, it just is no longer shown to front end, regular users.
If you are concerned of your posts and comments being used to feed openai, its way too late
What’s better is to edit every comment and keep your acc active so they can’t roll it back.
I asked through support whether they keep previous versions of edited comments and posts, which they claimed that they don’t.
Obscure old reddit posts saved my ass so many times when coming across random tech problems. So while I understand why people delete their accounts, from a personal point of view I appreciate when people leave them up.
Yeah, not actively supporting reddit anymore is one thing, but with deleting every comment/post you basically just hurt users. Reddit doesn’t give a fuck.
You won’t believe how often I search for a problem only to find 50 "Thank you"s for a deleted comment.
You won’t believe how often I search for a problem only to find 50 "Thank you"s for a deleted comment.
That just means it’s working. It causes people to search info elsewhere
That means the info is gone and nowhere to be found anymore. Yeah, post it somewhere else from now on, but don’t delete your old stuff.
reddit is not the entire internet. Your inability to find info without using Google to search reddit posts says more about your habits than it does the state of the internet.
Reddit not being the entire internet doesn’t mean that every bit of information on reddit is also available elsewhere.
