Reddit makes it impossible to delete PII, refuses to do it itself violating GDPR [video]
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youtube.com
Sad to see a big part of internet history going down, but the mismanagement just compounds.
Takes about 2 minutes to arrange by the looks of it. [0]
Wonder if they'll restore it. If they're following their own reddiquette then they won't, but can't say I have any faith in Reddit Inc left
Consider reddit.com/r/redditseppuku
Though you do need to give it access to your account via auth which many probably won't like
If they restore the comments I'll look at something more sophisticated like editing with PRAW.
It says Reddit is restoring deleted content, but the footage suggests the opposite.
At one point, the user deletes all their content, and then, the next day, they refresh their profile, and content is there again. But it isn't the content we saw them delete (granted, they cut some of the deletions from the video). The content we saw them delete was posted to a variety of subs. The supposedly restored content, in contrast, is all from r/javascript.
As some video comments point out, r/javascript was apparently private while the user were deleting their content. After the deletion, but before the user refreshed their profile, the sub went public again.
So, the fact that the Reddit UI doesn't show users the content they posted to now-private subs seems to be the real culprit here. That said, it's still a problem. It would be better if users could control their own content regardless of subs' current public/private statuses.
Good luck to reddit trying to block this if tens of thousand of users are doing it.
How do you know this?
If you delete comments/posts they come back after a while.
Since comments/posts may include personally identifiable information that's a GDPR/CCPA violation. Not just a dick move this time, but also illegal.
it doesn't make sense to me that reddit has to remove messages when mailinglists don't because they can't. on some systems quotes are implemented as embedded links to the original message, so if the message disappears, the quote disappears. on hackernews quotes are copies that can't be removed.
why should personal rights go so far as to remove your contributions to a public discussion?
shouldn't that be limited to actually removing only the personally identifiable information that is embedded in the messages?
Technically, you would have to send a request to every party to delete all your PII.
A common theme is to set the user ro "deleted user".
As long as it is not associated with you it's fine.
Also you request deletion that the party and their contractors hold. So a mailing list may not show your name for past messages, but delivered mails are outside their perimeter/scope.
I've since run PowerDeleteSuite again and most of my comments have remained deleted. A couple from several years ago have just popped back into existence in the last few days though.
Reddit seems to target me with sponsored posts very specific to the industry that I work in, despite the fact that I do not have an account.
- Exclusively use iOS private relay - Do not use apps, only use web versions of services - 1blocker iOS installed - I don't use any Google products or the search engine
I raised a GDPR request with Reddit, and they stated that they have no way of knowing who I am when I use the site if I am not actively signed in.
How is reddit able to target me specifically with sponsored posts that are specific to the industry and skillset I'm in? What PII do they hold and how can I request they remove it?
Why post it here? Any HN user can favorite comments they like, I don't see it controversial that mods have their own labeled favorites list.
Lemmy got some exposure, as did Mastodon. But that exposure is very small. We're living at a time where people's attention span and focus is entirely depleted and nobody wants to move away from that which is already comfortable and familiar.
It's also a great example of how a whale can just swallow up the consequences because it is that big and that deeply rooted. Reddit is going full steam ahead towards its IPO with a huge (and it's clear now, a conscious) "fuck you" flag waving in the turbulence.
As a form of nuisance I did request all my Reddit information[0] under GDPR and they're obligated to deliver on it.
this is probably reddit's biggest PR nightmare and this will make a permanent stain on the company.
Lemmy/kbin getting increased development is probably the best case scenario.
with the reddit sync dev and other devs making 3rd party clients we're going to see Lemmy be a viable alternative in the coming weeks or months.
I've already stopped using reddit on mobile. if they kill old reddit then my usage drops by over 90 percent
I'm trying to like Lemmy but it really needs a data dense "old.lemmy" interface. I doubt I'll stick with it...
Also, with a non-hostile API, it's very much possible for somene to design such an interface
You might find something here that floats your boat (you need the stylus extension): https://userstyles.world/search?q=lemmy (you might need to adjust on which pages these styles apply tho)
It was less than a week into Digg v4 when the front page was just a ton of Reddit links. I think that was pretty much the end, but don't have traffic/user numbers.
I'm starting to suspect that whole comments, votes and views are driven by many people, it's actually a fairly small cadre who gather and post conte nt for everyone else to view, comment and vote on... and a lot of that seems to have stopped.
The impression I get is that Reddit is walking wounded at the very least, and that while the protest didn't accomplish much, it was in fact a small outcropping of a deeper issue. The blackout was the iceberg above the water, people just saying "screw it, I'm done" is the other 90% below the waterline.
Meme subs will rage on as always, but I honestly wonder how much of those are majority bot-generated content at this point. In the last couple of years there's already been a serious uptick in recycled content from prior years, same or similar subs, to harvest upvotes on accounts.
Much like Twitter, I suspect certain communities will linger on. Local city subreddits, cesspools that they are, seem to be going strong still. But I don't consider that much of a loss, it's basically a (slightly) better Nextdoor.
I suspect third-party apps make up a huge portion of power user interactions, simply because the alternatives on mobile are really crappy. I guess we'll see for sure on the 30th.
On the other hand, if you ever want to karma whore, this is your moment. The most bottom of the barrel submissions are getting crazy karma.
In my experience, that’s been the case for the big subs/most of the stuff that makes its way to r/all for the last several years. Like all other social media, anger seems to get the most engagement. But I haven’t used reddit since the end of April (when I got sick of the ragebait posts myself and uninstalled Apollo).
I’ve genuinely been missing the “news” on communities I frequent. I’ve been spending way more time on HN, but it’s not the same when the specific communities arent represented here.
Genuinely curious on how your Lenny intro went.
When I search Lemmy, I see depressingly meager results like communities with only 23 members. That's smaller than my BBS days in the 1980s! I must be doing something wrong?
Growth will be slow, and perhaps at some point previous browsers may become creators themselves to facilitate this.
This is where the ActivityPub comes in. It lets the server graft in foreign "subreddits" from other servers and work with foreign users. This is where the federation/defederating comes in.
Basically you want to join a server that has a server local community you like and that also has a good reputation amongst other servers in the fediverse.
Ultimately, the fediverse seems to be little more than not having to create a new account on every server. So picking your "home" server seems to be a little more important than the "pick a server, any server" hype.
Beyond that the main difference in servers is whether you prefer the lemmy or kbin user interface. (You can use kbin communities on lemmy and vice-versa)
I ended up signing up at programming.dev, and I have subscribed to a few communities on beehaw.org (much more established communities) and kbin.social. But so far it seems to all be tech related.
I stopped going during the protest and haven’t gone back since. It was the straw for me.
I suspect I am not alone in this.
The protestors were the ones doing it until the proposed API changes were called off, but of course reddit smashed that by shutting down communities and replacing mods.
Sorry but this is just revisionist history. If this was the intention them the mods and third party app users would have just taken 2 days off. They didn't do that, they set their communities to Private. It was a protest.
So really, the "protest" is your revisionist history.
There's the effect on reddit, I don't feel qualified to quantify it, but it's the smaller of the two.
There's the effect on every single competitor, it's a huge positive one.
Competitors can only grow so fast, infrastructure takes time to scale, communities take time to organize and build. The most similar reddit alternatives (kbin, lemmy, specialized forums) have been growing as quickly as they possible could under the circumstances.
There still not big enough to absorb all of reddit, but they are a lot closer than they were, because of the protest. That's a huge accomplishment, and a long term existential threat to reddit.
To say the "protest has accomplished absolutely nothing" is highly ignorant.
When push comes to shove a majority of these moderators would rather hold onto their perceived fiefdom for some form of semblance of power and control in their life than growing a backbone, standing up for what they say they believe in and deleting their account in protest.
If you want quantified numbers I suppose you could view charts like
https://the-federation.info/platform/184 <--- Bunch of tabs at this site
https://the-federation.info/platform/73
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/commit-activity
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/activity/daily <-- Not sure how to generate nice charts from this one
But frankly, if you need me to tell you this, you aren't remotely qualified to write that article.
Would you like me to retort to saying that I am incompetent to write this article? I don't think you would like that very much.
For me it's just a last straw on the camel's back. The site has obviously gone severely downhill since pivoting from the old.reddit.com desktop-based site that focused on links and discussion, akin to a forum, to what it is now, an infinite scroll of half pics and gifs, half rage-bait. There is not much interesting discussion going on on Reddit these days, the change of the UX to prioritize mobile use has changed the entire nature of the site to favour short quips and less thoughtful posts. People on this board will often say things like "oh well at least if you go to your specific niche subreddits there is still good discussion being had", but even this is much reduced. Go to any long lived historically discussion-heavy board like say /r/Coffee, /r/LetsTalkMusic, /r/TheoryOfReddit, etc. If I look in the internet archive and go back 10 years, I generally find much more interesting conversations being had back then.
This latest debacle killed that goodwill for a lot of us. Why bother contributing -- through moderation, posts, or even upvotes/downvotes -- to a site that clearly doesn't value the rest of us?
On the bright side, HN has continued to host decent conversations for years running now. There are a few decent communities growing on Lemmy, Tildes, and Squabbles as well. I'm excited for the distributed future, I think the Fediverse is going to provide a lot of decent competition in terms of hosting, UI, and moderation over the next couple of years. It's much needed after almost two decades of stagnancy from Reddit.
I'm a mod in a niche forum which suddenly got more popular due to Reddit's BS and trust me, it's a mess. We went from "not even I remembered to log in every month" to "multiple crashes due to excessive load".
We won't ever be a threat to Reddit, but the protest is definitely going to become a threat to my sanity...
I still consider the growth of the forum as a net positive (because it's a cool space which has produced cool things in the past), but since it's running on spare time and money, our ability to absorb new users is limited. And won't scale really quickly, because we don't plan on making money out of it.
Are you using an IT structure from the 1990's? Are you funding it using mail in contributions?
If not the only restriction on how fast a platform can grow is entirely down to how fast it can draw attention and acceptance from the masses.
If I'm being honest here these other platforms are a significantly smaller threat to reddit than reddit is. The way the platform reward low value posts and punish any dissenting opinions in discussion threads does more damage to their brands than any wpuld be competitor.
Not that database scaling can be an issue, or funding, or finding limits in your application.
Why don't I strap on my money helmet and squeeze down into a money cannon and fire off into moneyland where money grow on moneys?
So it worked for me, even if everyone else stays on Reddit I don't particularly care.
But sure, unless reddit mods were ready to walk en masse (because it would take a few weeks to get everything in order, and maybe months to re-stabilize reddit) this wasn't going to be some coup de grâce. It was always going to be either nothing or a slow death by 1000 paper cuts as the creators moved elsewhere.
>Lemmy got some exposure, as did Mastodon. But that exposure is very small.
I say that is a good thing. very small for reddit's scale is more than enough to create a network effect if all the cards are right. I don't think they were but I've seen worse hands in lieu of these blackouts.
I don't think the goal of any people leaving should be to pretend that there will be a 100% perfect replacement with all the bells and whistles and none of the bullshit. Rebuilding will take years and the best time to start was yesterday. If that sounds like work, then you see why "a whale can swallow up the consequences".
for your substack?