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Comment by Klonoar | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has almost 20 years of comments.

You could certainly argue that it's less true now that there's legitimate people commenting, but there are years old threads on there with very helpful and valuable information that you can only really find via some incantations of Google search.

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Have you ever looked at an old reddit comment thread.

  + Hey how do you do thing?
  |
  -+ [deleted]
   |
   -+ Thanks, that's just what I needed.

Some of that was a reaction to Reddit closing the APIs and blocking apps.

IIRC that was also done in a fear that they'll start using comments to train AI. And some users claimed that their manually removed comments from weeks to years ago reappeared again.

https://github.com/Tryhard-cs/reddit-download-tool

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951669

Treat Reddit as the temporary object storage system that it is.

Answered questions becoming unanswered is such an annoying thing. I'd prefer users who are willing to delete their comments day, weeks, months, years later to not reply at all and let someone else answer.

And why Reddit, or anybody else, allows modifying comments after such a long time is beyond me.

EDIT: These days there are even active users who are wiping their comment history on a regular basis. Very strange mindset.

Reddit will delete anything remotely controversial if it contains referenced facts. They banned and deleted my account for simply stating the 5th amendment prohibits requiring incriminating yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy League educated lawyer dug up the comment one year after I posted it, told reddit I was distributing illegal legal advice, and had my whole account nuked.

I got suspended for criticizing the state of Israel’s treatment of civilians in occupied territories, but they didn’t delete my account, though I stopped logging in after a week. (Logging in retains your subscriptions). I've seen plenty of similar comments to mine so I assume it was the work of some oddball who I responded to that has an connection to somebody who works there so they could pull some strings to suspend my account.

It isn't safe to criticise Israel on nearly any online platform. You should only ever do it with a throwaway account and a VPN, and Reddit bans VPNs.

At the same time Reddit was hosting Arabic speaking subreddits with communities that openly support terrorist groups.

Considering that some of the content may well be illegal in a few EU countries, I was surprised Reddit does not more proactively nuke it to protect themselves.

> Logging in retains your subscriptions

I'm sorry, is that something that happen recently? Because when I had an account there, subscriptions were permanent

What I meant was I was permanently banned so I can still login and get notifications of responses to my commments, just could not vote or change any of my subscriptions.

Reddit users also very frequently delete accounts and/or content.

After a shadow ban none of my old comments were visible anywhere on Reddit.

So I deleted all my content. If people can’t view my content, why have it online?

Nah, it's rare to see [deleted].

More common is seeing "tumble cup and he ran flew tree" due to users using anonymizing apps to remove their old data.

My real name account got banned for quoting something someone else said. Pretty hilarious in hindsight.

Which lawyer?

or "furiously sleep ideas green colorless". Reddit once started banning users for deleting their own comments, so people started editing them to random words instead.

Reddit HAD almost 20 years of comments, until about three years ago when they started to lock down APIs, remove moderators, and make poor choices. Users reacted accordingly and now you will just see a whole lot of [deleted] or comment content replaced with garbage data. It's no longer an archive or wealth of information it once was.

That redacted amount is absolutely miniscule and blown out of proportion.

Not in my experience. I see it almost every time I end up in a reddit thread from search results. I've recently started demoting it in Kagi. It's just not as good as it used to be. Newer threads tend to be full of junk and bots.

I see it quite often in reddit threads that appear in my google search results for obscure technical/hardware issues.

The original helpful comments were probably provided by switched-on users of whatever subreddit, and those same users are the ones most likely to nuke/overwrite their comment history when they leave the site.

Please provide data on your claim.

[This comment removed due to protest of Reddit's API changes]

More than 20 years

Put a fork in me, I'm done.

The rest of the internet is so enshittified by SEO garbage that searching for a problem you’re having and appending reddit is the only way to get a quick answer without scrolling for 5 pages down an article.

Then you're getting a marketing bot half the time.

I went to look up how to disable shipped results in facebook marketplace and non Reddit results were all multi page articles. Even if bots are marketing on Reddit at least it’s in short form and without a deluge of ads.

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