Reddit is especially bad about this. I’m tired of seeing deleted posts leaving tattered conversations where you can hardly tell what someone is talking about. Content you post online should be as immutable as possible.
I created that content, I can decide what is done with it. If I dislike the direction reddit is going I should be able to remove said content and prevent reddit from generating income for it.
Reddit didn't pay me to provide the information I did, neither did you. Neither of you are entitled to it remaining there indefinitely.
I actually like OPs tool though, I don't have an issue with what it does, however I would if it stored that data on OPs servers and then trained an LLM on it or sold the information to an ad company.
Suffice to say I think LLMs are going to degrade the general internet due to people not wanting what they said in an LLM. I personally post for other humans to benefit, not for a corporation to train an LLM on and make a ton of income. I'm fine however with a platform using tasteful ads to fund it's own operations.
Insert random ideas about posts made online being equated to a public speech and where that falls in the copyright laws that currently exist for the future LLM that parses this stuff.
Not your content, not your choice.
Reference the current legislation being put in place around the world regarding privacy as proof that I am not in the minority here.
Also it did work exactly like that since reddit allowed me to delete said content and and chose to stop posting or interacting with reddit.
Could there be a copy my reddit history out there somewhere? Sure.
Do I have an issue with that? Nope.
Would I have an issue with that if that copy was held by reddit and they still trained LLMs or sold it to ad companies? Yes and I'm sure I also have legal standing on that backed by my government.
Don't like it, don't post it
Oh honey.
I ran into an rare issue with one software last year that I couldn't remember what it is. I saw the error in the log and posted it in Google. There are only one Reddit post in search of this error. The deleted user deleted the comment of the solution, preventing anyone from fixing the issue. That deleted comment have more than 200 child comments for thanking for the simple solution and other are asking other what are the solution after the deletion.
Some got around by quoting the comment to for those deletion situations. I get they want to protect their privacy and whatnots. It is rather infuriating when it is the only solution in the entire internet that are deleted.
It would be nice to be able to disown a comment, instead.
Comments that accidentally reveal personal information, that would be a nice use-case for deletion. But on the other hand, nothing can be deleted from the internet, so having the button there could add a false sense of security.
In theory that's true; anything Donald Trump says, for instance, can never be deleted.
In practice, if someone on Reddit deletes their post, it's extremely unlikely you'll be able to recover it. It's not a probability of zero, but pretty close to it. You could file a lawsuit and then Reddit will have to find it, but otherwise, it's gone.
I doubt that unless it's criminal evidence or something
A file on the internet obviously could be backed up by anyone, so deleting things from the internet does not verifiably restore your privacy.
A file on the internet might not be publicly accessible in the future. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been backed up privately.
It is the worst of both worlds.
Probably it won't, though, for most people.
Posts made after the API access was removed would not be in Pushshift.
Posts made before, are still in Pushshift. Deleting a post from the site doesn’t remove it from Pushshift.
So… kinda not anymore? At least not publicly, using the officially supported API.