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Comment by RainbowFriends | Hacker News Reader

The behavior of Reddit's management has inspired me to login through the series of accounts I have created over the years and delete all content I had contributed to. Doesn't management realize they are dependent on people like us to create content to generate value for the website?

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He does not care about users like you.

>>I know I’m focusing a lot on that, but that’s where a lot of the protests in the community are focused. People appear to really love these apps. And, apparently, they think Reddit itself is not offering the experience they’re looking for. People talk about leaving the platform because they can’t use these apps. So if Reddit is going to shut down these apps, you’re going to lose people who loved Reddit, and that still doesn’t quite make sense. So I guess I’m wondering why hasn’t there been...

>90-plus percent of Reddit users are on our platform, contributing, and are monetized either through ads or Reddit Premium. Why would we subsidize this small group? Why would we effectively pay them to use Reddit but not everybody else who also contributes to Reddit? Does that make sense?

>These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free. And that free comes at the expense of our other users and our business. That’s what this is about. It can’t be free.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

The entire article is just so bizarre and needlessly hostile that I'm amazed they're allowing him to do interviews.

I read the article and Huffman seems quite reasonable. Basically that they are asking profit making apps like Apollo to cover server costs, which seems not ridiculous if Reddit is loss making and Apollo profit making. I get the impression that some people who say they don't like corporate doublespeak are upset because Huffman just says pay or move on instead of doing the doublespeak. My biases - I did his python course and thought he seemed ok, also I use old reddit on the laptop and it works fine.

My dude, server costs are a tiny fraction of what they are charging for API access.

One API call probably costs on the order of a millionth of a cent if not less. The infrastructure costs of running a server are extremely cheap.

Third party apps aren’t upset that their free API access is getting charged; it’s the ridiculously high price, along with very short notices that make it painfully obvious of Reddit’s intention to permanently encapsulate all traffic in-house.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357164

This link has been marked as a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354850

Still appreciate that you posted this, as otherwise I would never have seen it. Thank you!

You'll want to destructively edit them, because apparently Reddit has recently started removing soft delete flags on some content, and it's not clear to people why besides possibly this blackout.

It's not clear if Reddit has post history to rollback destructive edits.

They must so people can't just edit away ban-worthy content

A substantial portion of my destructive edits (that were followed by deletion) appear to have now been rolled back, so it appears they do have the ability. These were recently deleted, however; there may be a time limit based on edit time.

Thanks for sharing this.

Why were they rolled back? Your content was deemed important?

Spez doesn't want comments that say "this comment was removed"; it hurts the IPO.

I opted for "This space intentionally left blank".

I went with “Apollo didn’t kill itself”

Okay, that's quite funny. Thank you.

same article says they're rolling back destructive edits

Anything stopping you from editing them again?

if you've deleted the account, you no longer have a "handle" onto the comment.

Depending on how they've done the restore, you may not have a handle on the comment even if you haven't deleted the account.

Also, nothing stopping them from doing any of it again.

This is false. Feel free to link to your source which will inevitably turn out to be someone who doesn't understand that the problem was actually in their deletion script or their understanding of it.

I have deleted all my comments and posts once. The way I did it required a lot of clicks, and I only had <100 things to delete. I couldnt find a better way to do it and neither will the average reddit user who has 1000s of comments.

There’s a number of scripts and tools on GitHub, findable by search engines. “Power Delete Suite” is the one I used.

The hurdle isn’t in finding Power Delete Suite. It’s in knowing what a Bookmarklet is, or what a bookmark is, or what a favorites bar is.

Many people go to Reddit 20 times a day by typing “Reddit” (or some variation like “redit”) into Google 20 times a day and clicking the first search result.

I don't understand how this is related to the post you replied to

People can easily find tools for bulk editing/deleting Reddit comments. They can't easily use them.

Power Delete Suite is a bookmarklet. It's installed by clicking the link in the Github readme, going off to a CodePen, and clicking and dragging the resulting red button to the Favorites Tab.

Probably greater than 90% of Redditors who are interested in using it wouldn't know how and would give up. I'm guessing the number is actually closer to 100% than it is to 90%.

They don't have a mental model of what a bookmarklet is. They don't even have a mental model of what a URL or browser address bar is, much less dragging something to their favorites bar and going through two levels of redirects ("you got the latest version!"... "you need to be on your reddit profile page!") before they hit a page that lets them bulk delete comments.

It's relevant to the point that that post was replying to. "I couldnt find a better way to do it and neither will the average reddit user who has 1000s of comments."

The level of understanding (or level of willingness to figure out a more optimal way or even conceive that a more optimal way is available) of the typical computer user (which is probably not that far from the typical reddit user, because reddit is a mass-appeal site) is shockingly low. I've seen people with science PhDs open their browser to their default search engine page [Bing], type in Google, search for it, click on the resulting link, and then type their search query. Those people are not going to be finding the "easy delete script".

> Many people go to Reddit 20 times a day by typing “Reddit” (or some variation like “redit”) into Google 20 times a day and clicking the first search result.

This describes my father getting to Google. It was painful to witness. I tried to explain for about ten seconds, then opted that what he was doing worked for him and chose to pick my battles.

It would be impossible for him to use a tool like a bookmarklet unless someone set it up on his behalf. The barrier to use such a tool as PDS is nothing to a bunch of people who understand tech topics. It's unrealistic for a lot of others. I was going to say that I thought young people who grew up online could figure it out, but I've seen comments about teaching mobile-first CS students about filesystems, so…

Thanks for that. It was very easy to delete all my reddit history https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerDeleteSuite/ there's even a video tutorial, less than a minute long.

You think the average reddit user cannot (or will not) google "reddit delete all comments"? Googling is the first resort for most people.

California consumer privacy act requires customer data deletion upon request. That includes user generated content. Just file a CCPA deletion request?

THIS is the way at least people in the EU and California could bring the asshole reddit management to its knees.

Just ab avalanche of private account data deletion under CCPA or GDPR (or ARCO in Mexico yay!) Would make break reddit where it hurts. Most companies are not prepared to automate that.

That would be impactful.

I would be shocked if they were on track for an IPO and don’t have this automated. But I also disagree it would be impactful. Reminds me of the Facebook groups from a dozen years ago: “we will quit Facebook until the old design is brought back.” Guess who won that!

There's also Shreddit.

https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

And this version which has been updated recently: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit

That is an entirely different tool with the same name.

I used a tampermonkey script to do this.

They don't deserve any of it. Hope this puts and end to the site and their greed

I would question the monetization value of a user visiting reddit to read a 4 year old post about the best water pump, vs. "normie" users just flipping through their front page

These investors are trying to make back 1.3 BILLION dollars sunk into a social network in the top 10 websites visited in the US that can't make money, they're rightfully trying to go full facebook/instagram/normie. What if I told you old.reddit only accounts for 10% or less of web users. That people are actually able to browse new reddit (I personally can't).

tl;dr: For the content they're looking for, no they dont need someone like you who's deleting old posts they don't care about

Search engines refer people to those old threads. Users who care enough and are tech savvy enough to delete their post histories are more likely to have made higher quality comments in the past answering tech support questions, reviewing products, etc. Those are the old threads that appear in search results and potentially draw in new users.

Having old reddit history show up repeatedly in your search results is part of what creates perceived value to get on the treadmill and follow things happening now.

You're not hurting reddit. You're hurting also the community that could benefit from that information as you have, leaving a trail of [deleted]

Let's be honest: you're hurting both but the latter will find other ways to hold the information in a way which may not be bound to a corporation led by a lying weasel.

u/spez needs to be removed as CEO.

It's not going to matter imo.

Once they accepted $1.3B in vc the die was cast. If it's not spez, it will be someone else.

That said, ballooning reddit from 300 employees to 2k while simultaneously (somehow?) being largely incapable of delivering the mod tools promised for a decade, making the site or the app accessible, or improving their app past what a 1.5 person dev team can deliver certainly merits firing.

Maybe they should replace all comments and posts with something like

"This content was removed by the user in protest of Reddit's draconian actions toward third party developers."

I don't actually see that as something I should care about. My interest in chatting online on a forum isn't that my convo is available to everyone for eternity.

I wouldn't even grant that access to old posts is a particularly useful part of a community. Even on HN it doesn't impact my day to day except to laugh at that dropbox rsync guy once a year.

Good. That community should die because reddit is leeching on it. We don't negotiate with terrorists.

Terrorists?

I must have missed something.

More of an analogy. If you kidnap US citizens then (officially) the US won't negotiate with terrorists to set the hostages free. People shouldn't try negotiating with reddit admins.

Because they took someone hostage? Seriously, even as an analogy that is ridiculous.

Because they took everyone's IP hostage - please, do try to follow the conversation.

I think that the jest here is warranted. To evoke such an analogy under these relatively futile circumstances is odd.

It’s not odd at all, it’s a common saying in situations like this or even less “serious” situations.

It's hyperbole. I'm dying to know whether you already understood that.

But this is the terrorism part: you're hurting random innocent people to terrorize the leadership into doing things your way.

Random innocent people are not entitled to the content I chose to freely create (however valuable said content is, or not).

Sure, what does that have to do with Reddit the company, or with terrorists?

> That community should die because reddit is leeching on it. We don't negotiate with terrorists.

Multiple people in this thread have stated that they believe that users deleting their own content is "destroying the community/Reddit", to which I say "their access to said content is a privilege that can be revoked, not a right", and users who do this (of which I am not one) should not be made to feel guilt.

Community contributions are a voluntary act, not an obligation.

"They" = company or community?

Why reply to me instead of those people if they are who you're reacting to?

Hopefully Reddit will exercise the prerogative to hit the undelete key. The idea that forum posts belong to the author in perpetuity is a weird mental hangup; forum posts are a conversation and after a certain grace period, contributors should not have the right to memory-hole the past.

Depending on jurisdiction, they literally do have that right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

Do you feel the same way about public posts on social bookmarking sites?

(If yes, you might want to update your FAQ and privacy policy.)

No, I think it applies to public forum conversations, like the one we are having. You shouldn't have the right to prevent future generations from seeing how I zinged you good.

That’s the point. Reddit turned on the community. So people want to remove their contributions to the community. If everyone did so there’d be nothing left.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com