cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/73406944
It all started when my main Reddit account was banned—simply because I posted a comment criticizing the banning of a subreddit—resulting in the immediate loss of an account I’d held for about 4 years, with 102k karma. I appealed, but I received no response—not even a reason for my ban, nor any notification that I had been banned in the first place. I’ve filed appeals repeatedly over the past few months, but today, I’m finally giving up. Fuck Spez and his pathetic, whore of a family. When I submitted my appeals, there wasn’t even any indication that they had gone through; I was just left in total silence, unable to do a thing. I started using an existing alt account for basic tasks, but today, that account was banned too—all because I recommended the non-profit, open-source “VPN Gate” project to someone who was complaining about the mandatory KYC (age verification) requirements being imposed in my country. The only reason I was still using Reddit was out of habit, and I’ve decided it’s time to change some of my habits. Ultimately, this is the inevitable fate of every centralized corporation—without exception. There’s no guarantee that some complete moron won’t end up in charge of any of them. I wish more people realized this. If four years of my effort are being sold off to AI data companies, and everything can be permanently wiped out overnight without a word of warning, then that is, quite simply, data theft. Once again, fuck you, Spez—you absolute piece of shit. If you had even an ounce of courage or integrity, you wouldn’t have imposed those damn API restrictions in 2023 and ruined Reddit. I truly regret the four years I spent here, but it’s better to cut my losses now. Goodbye, you son of a bitch Spez, and your puppet, Reddit…
“we don’t want you to participate anymore but we still want you to look at ads”
They have ads? Joking but I never saw any with firefox on ublock. So at least I screwed them back a little, but they got all my comments for free, no small thing adding up all of our contributions, worth more than the ad revenue in many ways.
That’s why I deleted my posts and comments regularly. There are even scripts to do this on mass https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I used that to delete all my posts, and then a month later had a notification for a reply on a post that from my profile page I couldn’t see (as they were all deleted) but on the thread was still visible.
Don’t delete, edit your posts to fill them with nonsense.
I kind of wanted to leave mine up for posterity though. For the real people that may come across the stuff. But perhaps that was a mistake I’ve been turning that over, wondering if I should’ve just deleted it all.
I get where you’re coming from. It feels wrong to let years of writing just vanish when it might still help someone. But leaving it up keeps concentrating all that value inside a company that only ever wanted it to sell ads and train models with it. It’s already bad enough that a normal search often means appending “reddit” to the query. They gain so much power from that dynamic that I’d rather burn my old writing with me than keep feeding it. And honestly, since they can wipe an account overnight without a word, “posterity” there is rented at best. I’d rather start over and help build the information here, in the fediverse, where it can’t be taken away by anyone person or organization.
You sold me. Unfortunately I don’t know if I can even remember all my handles, but I should try. Although the data scrapers have it all already by now, at least reddit and new crawlers won’t.
I wonder if there is a program to download all of your conversation trees first for yourself, then delete? I should look around for that first.
The power delete suite can do this as well. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite#%3A~%3Atext=You+can+do+an+export+of+all+the+content+you+filter%2C+whether+or+not+you're+deleting+or+editing!