Deleting comments, ugh, please don't do this :( If you must, make a throwaway account instead. It sucks to find a thread that promises to solve a problem you have, but when you go there critical context is missing due to deleted comments.
The problem is while the user is moving the comments are not, only deleted
Which will probably damage another user more than hurt reddit
Besides the user might delete things that would be interest read years later
Should be mentioned the rights are retained by the user. Reddit only gets license to reproduce that content and allow others to do the same. Although also being perpetual, irrevocable, it's similar to ownership cannot say they're the same thing.
I can totally respect someone trimming all their online footprint to avoid that.
If you want to retain your online anonymity, you have to be thoughtful about what you share online.
There's another kind of privacy where your cousin sees your reddit user id and looks up your comment history and finds out you are [_____insert secret here___].
Deletion of your history is a protection against the second kind.
Ha! Wishful thinking with all of the auto-archivers. If you post on reddit, it's likely already crawled and archived somewhere.
Personally I put a lot of PHP and VB code out ~20 years ago that I could find easily until I couldn't. There's Myspace profiles I've tried to pull up, images posted by friends 15 years ago in random places. Early video. All gone.
I’m not sure which factor is more influential—the ability for data to persist, or the ability for it to then be found and interpreted. Would it matter if the content was still available in some forgotten corner of the internet if there weren’t effective tools available for finding it and connecting it back to its author?
It’s actually sort of entertaining to test the limits of this on yourself. I tried to find original media and references from a band I played with circa 2002. We were being ambitious with our publicity efforts, and consistently pumping audio, video, and images onto whatever nascent services were available at the time (from memory I can recall CD Baby, LastFM, Craigslist, miscellaneous forums, and towards the end, MySpace). I had already been designing websites for several years by that point, so we had a website, one that wasn’t just a Geocities/Anglefire template. That said, I am pretty sure that was at the height of my career with Macromedia’s Flash and ActionScript, so no real surprise that it didn’t get Archived in any functional form.
One strategy that my own experience has found quite effective is to avoid using unique or unusual identifiers. If you’re named something like Arthur Dent it is going to be considerably more difficult to find and associate information than if you’re name is Zaphod Beeblebrox. That’s obvious, but it extends to everything else, from usernames to product brand preferences—if you stick to the middle of every given bell curve then your needle will necessarily reside in a much larger haystack. The few things that tend to be unique, at least when correlated with things like timelines or location—things like telephone numbers, email addresses, usernames, account numbers, etc.—can usually be effectively obscured one way or a another. The things that can’t (government ID numbers) then become crucial to keep private. Except, at least one of those creepy services (TLOxp) was built by one of the three main credit rating agencies and so almost definitely has your social security number already, and has been attaching it to all manner of data for several years, all while also selling it off to anyone with a budget (not to mention losing it outright to hackers), so any concerted efforts to conceal oneself seems almost certainly doomed. It’d be an ideal problem for national governments to address using consumer protection laws and privacy regulations if it wasn’t also in our best interests to protect ourselves from said governments.
Sorry for the essay, this line of thought evidently yanked a pretty intertwined thread for me.
The issue is "deleting."
AFAIK, nobody's disagreeing that the internet can forget and deleting is "better" for privacy.
The question is "how much" better.
Here we're talking about the false sense of privacy through erasure when archivers should be assumed to be running everywhere and at all times. The latter weighs in favor of the parent's critique that deleting is not constructive.
I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this
> launder your style through ChatGPT
> I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this
It seems totally feasible. Though I think it would be far more interesting to make a purpose built anti-stylometry tool, that explicitly tries to analyze for and mute the signals stylometry uses.
Edit: what I'm talking about is apparently called "adversarial stylometry":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylome...
Having an LLM rewrite a comment would do this entirely, no?
Are you just interested from an academic perspective how one might build something more surgical, that only changes some words in a comment?
> Are you just interested from an academic perspective how one might build something more surgical, that only changes some words in a comment?
Yes and no. ChatGPT seems like a blunt instrument, and given it's not purpose built, it could miss certain characteristics that could enable identification.
Also LLMs kind of have their own style, and adopting that particular style is likely self-defeating to getting a message out (e.g. I would tend to ignore something that sounded like it was written by ChatGPT). Manual correction then be needed, but it would be hard with such a system, because I think that would tend to re-introduce the author's style.
Just mention a "devil strip" in every post and call it a day.
Anyway, that in and of itself doesn't bother me - The parent was trying to present a "holier than thou" attitude towards Reddit. I merely pointed out that HN is not all that great when it comes to that.
With the amount of time musk and trump have had in the spotlight and the awful shit they've objectively actually done, it should make people question your integrity if you are writing positively about them. Like it or not, downvotes are an expression of disapproval.
If you can't find a single positive impact of trump's (or any politician) policies or a single positive thing musk has done, consider that you maybe be in an echo chamber yourself, or you're just deluding yourself into thinking you have some kind of moral high-ground.
You're practicing whataboutism here.
>If you can't find a single positive impact of trump's (or any politician) policies or a single positive thing musk has done
A broken clock is right twice a day. So let's let broken clocks rule and profit as much as they want regardless of the consequences, I guess? That's what you're advocating for. trump and musk have very dubious ideologies, they are both awful businessmen that treat their employees like shit. They've proven this over and over. And yes, there is moral high ground and these two are not in the same category morally as many other politicians and business people. Your whataboutism doesn't make them seem any better than they actually are to anyone but yourself.
Like, yeah dude. You think me being pissed that Obama didn't close Guantanamo is a sign that I'm going to be more sympathetic about Trump's policies? Come on now.
But sure, he did nice things for the most wealthy and practically nobody else but himself. There, I said he did a good thing. lol