CEO Steve Huffman says tech giants should not be able to trawl Reddit’s huge store of data for free. But that information came from users, not the company
That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service.
Ouch
I think Reddit has caught on to that and is reverting anyone who does mass edits as that is too obvious from their database logs, which is why I suggest doing it slowly and discreetly, you don’t even need to edit many of them, just a few of them over a period of time from before ChatGPT while still commenting so they don’t catch on and immediately revert until it is in their database backups.
I have heard conflicting versions. Some people are saying it seems that the locked-down subs are the ones where the new comments aren’t sticking. Which makes sense, but who knows what the truth is. None of us can trust anything Reddit or /u/spez says ever again, so it could be malicious or it could be technical.
My edits weren’t reverted. I think it depends on what tool you use. There’s a fork of Power Delete Suite that adds a 5 secs timer to be in compliance with new Reddit rate limits and it seems to work.
I have made multiple attempts to delete my reddit history. I tried shreddit, Power Delete Suite, and redact. The history kept popping back up. It got restored in waves, subreddit by subreddit.
Many people have said that the problem relates only to subreddits that went dark and this is not true. I had history popping back from many different subreddits, whether or not they participated in the blackout, and even after the blackout ended.
Finally with redact I tried modifying all my old posts rather than deleting them. That change seems to have stuck for now.
I noticed that my history was maintained on my mobile app (baconreader) after I used redact from my desktop a few days ago. Just confirmed it’s been restored on desktop, too. I’m seriously considering going one by one at this point and editing them cuz I’m that petty and have the time.