Is there any benefit to editing all of my comments before deleting my Reddit account?
I was thinking of replacing all of my comments with either lorem ipsum, or something intended to poison the well for the AI.
Is there any benefit to editing all of my comments before deleting my Reddit account?
I was thinking of replacing all of my comments with either lorem ipsum, or something intended to poison the well for the AI.
I’m very much not a fan of this approach. Preservation of conversation history on the web is valuable to real humans who may have bookmarked pages or be searching for obscure info.
And I’d have to imagine the whole corpus from past years has probably already been fed through AI. Besides that, editing/deleting comments probably only hides them from other users, Reddit may very well keep them saved (or at least have backups).
Best thing anyone can do, IMO, is avoid giving them new traffic and content. Attention is the currency they deal in, and most of it comes from people browsing new content.
I see where you’re coming from, but leaving the content gives a reason for people to go to the site for that information. I wish there were a separate place to put your comments and posts before erasing it from Reddit.
Any backup method still contributes pretty heavily to linkrot. But maybe for any significant comments or submissions, make sure archive.org or archive.is has the page. That’s something anyway.
I can understand not wanting to leave them any scraps, but my preference for balance still falls toward leaving the old and deciding to focus on changing the future.
This is probably true. Also, I think I would have to do this manually and I am lazy so there is that.
I didn’t bother, but I thought that was the point? Don’t underestimate the search result factor.
I suppose there’s truth to that, yeah - I get it, but just don’t think the tradeoff is worth it. I know Reddit probably loves the whole “add reddit add the end of your search query” thing people do, and they probably do get some onboarding from it. But my conjecture is that ongoing everyday traffic and content is more important for them, and if that were to dry up the value of the general purpose search results would follow. In my mind, deleting old content disproportionately affects users vs the company.
And just personally, I see value in the old stuff still being there. For many years people put worthwhile information there, and the website wasn’t so aggravatingly user hostile. In the present day, I think the energy is much better spent trying to make alternatives more appealing. Make an account on Lemmy or something, add a post to a community here, that kind of thing.