I never really cared about upvotes and downvotes, but I liked that my comments and participation meant something to someone at one time or another. I liked that when I posted a comment or asked a question people could look through my post history to learn more about me and answer accordingly. More than anything I miss my saved posts and comments and enjoyed going back to read through what was important or funny to me at a particular moment in time. I don’t have close friends or any family that lives within 1,000 miles so the connections I made through Reddit meant something.
I’m grieving.
14 years, 51k comment karma. It definitely feels very strange to leave it all behind.
I used to have an occasional habit of scrolling back through my own comments. It took me a long time to understand why. I don’t really participate in real-identity social media since I stopped using Facebook like a decade ago. So as an avid commenter for so long, my Reddit history is pretty much the most thorough and incisive chronicle of my own thoughts and evolution as a person. Almost a memoir. Seeing the types of stuff I was into, the way I thought and wrote, my opinions on the world, and how they changed over such a long period of time is really valuable to me.
Fortunately you can file a GDPR request and get a copy of the whole thing for yourself.
How do you do that??
https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
And it’s REALLY resource intensive and relatively expensive for them to do. EVERYONE SHOULD DO IT.