I’d been using Reddit for 6 years; thousands of hours. All gone, in a quick(ish) running of a script. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. Link rot is gonna be so much bigger soon. And everything that represents a mark on the platform from me will be gone.
I remember spending time on basically every interest I’ve had on there. I remember the memes, the political discussions, the anticipations of football transfers, the stunning source-gathering work on the Ukraine war, the shitposts, the communities willing to help me on the most stupid of questions. The hours spent defending random pixels on a canvas modified by other communities with friends, the awestruck silence of the Snap both in movie form and Reddit form. The support for me as a person when I needed it the most and real life couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t give to me.
And in a few minutes, that’ll all be gone. It’s already going away as I type this. Almost feels like a microcosm of my own mortality. Maybe I’m being overly sentimental, but it hurts. Anyone else feel the same?
Some things were definitely restored / not deleted tho. I’ve spent a week manually deleting all of my posts and comments until reddit displayed “this user hasn’t posted anything” and “there seems to be nothing here” two days in a row, then also used shreddit which found a whooping 981 MORE comments to delete, and then I nuked my account the next day after (!) checking that it was still empty.
… but now I can find a bunch of my older comments again. They’re no longer attributed to me (“posted by [deleted]”) but the content is still there. And that should not have been possible considering that I both manually deleted everything reddit chose to show me AND used a program that allegedly nukes everything.