Hacker News Reader

Comment by qrbLPHiKpiux | Hacker News Reader

I liked digg. A lot. Then v2.0 came, and I left to Reddit. A few months ago, I had a script write over all my comments, and deleted the account. Reddit is the new digg v3.0.

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What’s the current alternative?

Not Voat.

tildes.net

Got an invite?

Thanks, already went through some interesting rabbit holes

Hacker News? Twitter? Nothing? I don't know really, it seems like the best communities are also small ones. All of these sites are victims of their own success. I really enjoyed reddit when I joined many years ago, but its become a hot mess. My feed is curated to only small-ish sub-reddits and it still feels like something is missing. The whimsy of those earlier days is pretty much gone.

notabug.io

Ah, so you're one of the people that makes reading older threads on reddit a pain. Hope you know you directly made my internet experience worse.

Almost certainly these are still archived somewhere accessible, like wayback machine.

It's not their fault Reddit UI leaves [deleted] tombstones. Reddit even makes the WTF-level UX decision to show threads and threads and threads of [deleted] comments because a mod deleted top-level comments.

I've used scripts like it a few times. What I thought was clever was that some of them edit the comment before deleting it. It's trivial to have a is_deleted=true flag, but far less likely to store comment revisions.

If there's ever been a dispute about what a comment ever said prior to an edit, that anyone who worked at reddit cared about, there's a good chance they store all comment revisions even if they didn't at first. I would be very surprised if they do not store all comment revisions.

This reads as passive-aggressive and incredibly self-centered. People don’t owe you their content, and it should be understandable that someone might want to remove their posts from a site that they no longer support. If it’s the rewritten text that bothers you, that’s just the unfortunate consequence of sites that scrape reddit live.

It is pretty annoying when you find that thread with the exact knowledge to solve that exact question you've been struggling with only to find that everything has been wiped from the record. It harkens back to "BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED" messages that crippled the usefulness of old forum threads. It doesn't even benefit whoever deleted the comment, it isn't all that difficult to find a cached version of the site with the comment. If we value internet discussion as something beyond just spouting into the void, and as something useful to other people, then we wouldn't be erasing public facing comments after the fact like an anti-intellectual despot.

> This reads as passive-aggressive

To be fair it is, it was written in the heat of the moment.

> and incredibly self-centered

I don't agree. The commenter or anyone else who participated in the comments isn't an island. Threads now have holes and they read like puzzles with every 10th piece thrown out because the user decided to be self-centered.

You are completely correct, they don't owe me or reddit anything, but that doesn't mean that their act of disobedience, protest or grudge didn't leave collateral victims.

Imagine people re-writing or deleting their comments or answers on Stack Exchange. Sure, we aren't owed anything but it hurts thousands of people who click on it, and the website owner very little.

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