I was curious to see HN's view on removing Reddit account data. I have a couple old accounts (>12 years) with many thousands of comments. My personal perspective is that deleting all these comments, some of which contain technical help, advice, solutions, etc., would really be a net-negative for everyone.

I understand wanting to send a message to Reddit leadership, but in reality the blip is so small as to probably not even register.

On the other hand, those comments will probably be valuable to someone, somewhere, sometime and all I'd be doing is harming those future readers and salting the metaphorical earth.

Looking further into the future, let's assume Reddit collapses in 5 years in 2027. The money is dried up, management is gone, and all that's left are decades of data hopefully archived. Are people 5, 10, 20 years from now going to appreciate that a subset of data was purged in protest? Or are they going to appreciate that they found some useful data still in the archive that might actually help something?

I'd rather be in the latter camp. And maybe one day someone will ask their at-home AI bot a question about <niche topic>, and a small part of me will be emitted in the output.

I requested GDPR exports for my accounts 8 days ago, nothing turned up yet. I have shreddit lined up to run as soon as I get my zips.