Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, has decided to just keep on talking. After his disastrous AMA helped inspire more subreddits to join a 48 hour blackout, and his dismissal of the protesting subred…
When something is free, you are the product. Reddit has been a human farm for ages, using effectively “slave” (free) labor to maintain the herd. That massive data trove is now being sold for profit. That’s why it’s so important that Huffman preserve Reddit and is kicking recalcitrant mods (something I predicted would happen).
I admit, I unsubscribed to Reddit and logged off the day of the AMA, after giving Huffman a piece of my mind about his “double dipping.” I was fine paying him for no ads. I would have been fine paying Apollo a small subscription. There was no way I was going to pay Reddit AND Apollo for the use of Reddit, when Apollo was basically going to be forced to collect the money I was already paying Reddit (using the APIs as a blinder).
I am fine leaving behind a ghost account. And while I get the idea of taking your data with you, frankly, I am not a thought leader in any space, and most of my comment history are stray tidbits across multiple subreddits. Certainly nothing of any value. The only value I have is being someone who could have eyes on to ads, or interact with an ad, and that can’t happen if I’m not there. And I fully believe that there is more harm to cause by being inactive than in not being there at all. Huffman may have 400 million accounts, but how many of those are actively engaged? What if the number of inactive accounts keep growing?
Let u/spez be CEO of a graveyard of rapidly aging data and ghosted accounts. For those who have contributed, I think the best solution at this time is to get your knowledge archived in a searchable format and then just pick up elsewhere. Yeah, there will be work to re-grow the community, but I have found that folks do migrate to where the activity is. As subreddits go quiet, folks will look for where the action is. It’s what happened with MySpace and Livejournal, LiveJournal and Facebook and Facebook and Twitter. Reddit is no different. Nor is Twitter. People just forget and get complacent. Personally, I like to shake things up anyway. It’s time for change.
I keep my account and deleted every single comment or post I’ve made. If you have ever follow any thread, seeing a [deleted] comment is infuriating even if it turns out to be insignificant info. I want to maximize my departure’s effect and that’s exactly what I wanted.
I have been having to rerun my deletion scripts daily. They are actively restoring comments. Even after writing gibberish and deleting. They are now holding more than 1 backup.
Make a GDPR request to delete your data. Use a VPN to be in Europe, how are they going to know if you are or not a EU citizen? Are they going to risk the GDPR fines assuming you’re not a EU Citizen currently traveling in the US?
They definately log IPs. I’ve gotten warnings for voting on a post, switching accounts, and later voting on the same post I stumbled on before. They can probably see that pattern.
Either way it’s fine. I’ll keep running the script. It’s all JavaScript so no api needed. And let them burn compute time on restores.
That’s not a bad point. I still get the occasional reply notification from comments many years old, from people who were looking for a conversation on a topic and engaged with what I said a decade ago.
I suppose it would be somewhat impactful if those comments were just empty voids, perhaps even moreso if they were all replaced by a message saying something like “I left reddit because of X, look for me on the feddiverse to continue this conversation.”
When something is free, you are the product. Reddit has been a human farm for ages, using effectively “slave” (free) labor to maintain the herd. That massive data trove is now being sold for profit. That’s why it’s so important that Huffman preserve Reddit and is kicking recalcitrant mods (something I predicted would happen).
I admit, I unsubscribed to Reddit and logged off the day of the AMA, after giving Huffman a piece of my mind about his “double dipping.” I was fine paying him for no ads. I would have been fine paying Apollo a small subscription. There was no way I was going to pay Reddit AND Apollo for the use of Reddit, when Apollo was basically going to be forced to collect the money I was already paying Reddit (using the APIs as a blinder).
I am fine leaving behind a ghost account. And while I get the idea of taking your data with you, frankly, I am not a thought leader in any space, and most of my comment history are stray tidbits across multiple subreddits. Certainly nothing of any value. The only value I have is being someone who could have eyes on to ads, or interact with an ad, and that can’t happen if I’m not there. And I fully believe that there is more harm to cause by being inactive than in not being there at all. Huffman may have 400 million accounts, but how many of those are actively engaged? What if the number of inactive accounts keep growing?
Let u/spez be CEO of a graveyard of rapidly aging data and ghosted accounts. For those who have contributed, I think the best solution at this time is to get your knowledge archived in a searchable format and then just pick up elsewhere. Yeah, there will be work to re-grow the community, but I have found that folks do migrate to where the activity is. As subreddits go quiet, folks will look for where the action is. It’s what happened with MySpace and Livejournal, LiveJournal and Facebook and Facebook and Twitter. Reddit is no different. Nor is Twitter. People just forget and get complacent. Personally, I like to shake things up anyway. It’s time for change.
I keep my account and deleted every single comment or post I’ve made. If you have ever follow any thread, seeing a
[deleted]comment is infuriating even if it turns out to be insignificant info. I want to maximize my departure’s effect and that’s exactly what I wanted.I have been having to rerun my deletion scripts daily. They are actively restoring comments. Even after writing gibberish and deleting. They are now holding more than 1 backup.
Make a GDPR request to delete your data. Use a VPN to be in Europe, how are they going to know if you are or not a EU citizen? Are they going to risk the GDPR fines assuming you’re not a EU Citizen currently traveling in the US?
They definately log IPs. I’ve gotten warnings for voting on a post, switching accounts, and later voting on the same post I stumbled on before. They can probably see that pattern.
Either way it’s fine. I’ll keep running the script. It’s all JavaScript so no api needed. And let them burn compute time on restores.
That’s not a bad point. I still get the occasional reply notification from comments many years old, from people who were looking for a conversation on a topic and engaged with what I said a decade ago.
I suppose it would be somewhat impactful if those comments were just empty voids, perhaps even moreso if they were all replaced by a message saying something like “I left reddit because of X, look for me on the feddiverse to continue this conversation.”
All of my comments that I can access have been edited and left in place. Every one is now simply
“Deleted: I refuse to let Reddit profit off of my content when they treat their community like this”