Used a script to overwrite old comments to finalize my switch to Lemmy, and got this message from one of the subreddit that i commented.
Yes my intention is to annoy and create awareness. After i delete my account, Reddit is not going to get to keep my pearls of wisdom, or shenanigans. I hope more people edit their old comments to something like [moved to Lemmy].
If it’s entirely pointless… then why is there a bot to stop it?
It’s entirely pointless to stop something that is entirely pointless.
They say it’s pointless because it’s archived on other sites. The point is that Reddit specifically can’t profit off it
It’s not just corporate reddit though. Consider the time and effort invested in these communities. Obviously I left because I don’t want to support reddit (and because their non 3rd party interface is almost unusable), but there are mods of small communities that have put thousands of hours into building up these subs.
Ask Historians is a perfect example of a sub that gets punished by modified comments (and they have been highly supportive of protests). They are so heavily moderated that every comment is 100% on topic and each comment lost makes the hard work they put in less worthwhile. Now each person has a right to delete their own content, but it sucks to write a 3 page essay response with citations only to have the context be removed to spite reddit. The mods and contributors of the subs are suffering too, and at a time when maintaining the community is much harder.
It’s Huffmann’s fault for being a cunt. HE caused this. Could have worked it out with he devs and not lied. Blame him.
I agree completely, Reddit screwed up. Huffman is a petty tool and he’s running a lot of great communities.
My point is that it does hurt people who aren’t Reddit/Huffman. Mods and community members who have created and curated tons of content. It’s hundreds of hours of work to migrate that info, and not everyone will come with you if you do.
It was an easy choice for me because I’m not invested, but for those that have more at stake, moving platforms is a much bigger sacrifice.
The people who stayed aren’t necessarily wrong or bad, they could have good reasons and harder choices than shine of us here who lose very little, or maybe even some who lose a lot.
Ding ding ding
Such a funny move from tidder😁
Waybackmachine has your comments anyway so there’s no point in deleting them.
The hottest of hot takes.
Yeah let me just fire up the ol wayback machine every time I want to read a reddit comment lol
Worth noting that if you use Reddit exclusively via wayback and go back like a decade you’ll probably have a more enjoyable experience.
When half the content was Advice Animals? Debatable.
Or “all the things”, “bacon narwhal midnight”, and weird places to cum stories?
Back in my day we had to read through a 10-panel rage comic just to get the dumbest take imaginable
Do you even ice soap chili?
I’m still trying to figure out why I’m nostalgic for those days.
/r/fuuuuuu I think was called or something was one of the first subs I subscribed to back in the day, then I unsubbed after some time because I realized it was draining my IQ
So people can have the benefit of old helpful comments without having to visit reddit? Sounds like a plus.
Yup. Totally doesn’t sound desperate.
You mean “the bullshittiest of fake takes”
It’s not a hot take if they’re lying
You should tell them you’d rather people go to those other websites to see your comments than to give Reddit their business.
I wouldn’t bother writing replies to a bot, but if it makes you feel better.
It says you can contact the moderators if you have any questions right at the bottom.
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Yeah I used PowerDeleteSuite to “edit” and “delete” all my history, and it sure looked like it worked. When I go to my user profile and look under posts and comments nothing is there, but I am getting replies on comments from years ago (which is already stupid on its own) and there’s my comment, completely unedited and public🙃
Edit: I just checked mine and a bunch of comments were back. Turns out a few subs must have come out of private.
If you’re in the EU you can send a GDPR data takedown request, then if they fail to honor it you may be able to get a kickback from any fines they get slapped with
The fact that this bot exists at all makes me think this is actually a bigger problem for Reddit than I would have guessed.
That’s the automod for the sub in question. It’s not a reddit wide bot in this case.
Of course, it could be that reddit’s admins are helping mods make these kinds of reactions. I’d believe that. But the account itself in question (automoderator) doesn’t tell us anything about how reddit’s admins feel.
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This bot is controlled by mods, rather than admins.
I got insta banned from /r/steamdeck when I overwrote a comment. I didn’t actually break any sub rules as far as I could tell… I messaged them to thank them for helping to galvanize my decision to vacate the premises
That’s a canned response. I would regularly overwrite and delete my comments but some subs take offense to it for whatever reason. They either don’t get the point or they are trying to gaslight you with “it doesn’t matter anyway” bullshit
I’d be curious as to who the mod team is. That automod is very defensive and seems to be written from a pro spez point of view.
But I’m not going back to Reddit to check.
/r/History is filled with a bunch of Admin bootlickers anyway, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they haven’t seen too much forced mod turnover post-blackout.
That’s the point… we don’t want them accessing our comments on Reddit. Nobody gives a fuck about our comments appearing on some other archive website… What a ridiculous take someone programmed into this bot.
Reminder that just because it came from a mod or admin, doesn’t mean they aren’t completely and entirely wrong. Whoever programmed this response just objectively wrong here. Sometimes it’ll just straight perma ban you instead knowing you’re trying to mass delete your posts lol.
Bonkers!! I can’t believe how angry so many people are about people switching platforms 🙄
I mean it seems pretty clear to me that it’s not the switching platforms bit that they’re annoyed with.
The mods on the history sub have always been shit. No surprise they’d setup a smarmy bot response.
Are the automated tools still working? I couldn’t get them to work on the last few weeks of comments in my remaining account.
There are tools working purely from the browser in Javascript. That’s almost impossible for them to block those. The only thing they can do is detect events and react to it.
And then cry when people browse Reddit through archive.org, where they can’t display ads.
I remember an article (or maybe it was a comment on an article) from a supposed former reddit dev a couple weeks ago that their database caching for user comments doesn’t actually keep track of every comment you make, beyond a certain point older items will be dropped off the list as new ones are added. So for old accounts, not everything will be listed when looking at your comment list, which is how these tools usually work. The comments are all there in the database obviously and can be loaded when opening a page, but the cache for your account only allows X number of items to be referenced with old items dropping off as new ones are added. When you go to your account comment list it just looks up that cached reference list, it doesn’t actually search the database for everything. So on an old account it will have a lot missing because things have fallen off that reference list. Wish I could find that article of comment now to reference though.
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IIRC, it’s 1,000 comments. But, I cleaned my accounts regularly and switched to new alts every six months, so I just need to overwrite ~50 comments and a couple of posts made since the start of June.
It’s a tiny bit laborious but doable.
Unfortunately, for folks who waited to overwrite and wipe until after the API changes, I haven’t seen any mass-delete tools that are still working.
I wrote a simple updater that uses your GDPR request data to drive a browser automation tool (Puppeteer) to update your entire account history. It’s in Dart and should be easy to adapt into other languages https://lemmy.world/post/959507
The 1,000 comment limit refers to your profile - each of the New, Hot, Top & Controversial lists max out at 1000 comments. So when you use tools like PowerDeleteSuite they use these lists, and when they’re done they won’t have gotten everything.
To get everything you need to use the GDPR files which include links to every comment. Shreddit used to be able to take these, however I imagine it doesn’t work anymore with the API change. You can still use the links manually to go to each older comment and edit them, and maybe someone will modify PowerDeleteSuite or some other tool which works via website scraping rather than an API key.
There’s this if anyone needs a starter: https://lemmy.world/post/959507
Now, if only reddit would actually reply with my GDPR requests…
It took them a worryingly long time to process mine, but they did reply just before Fleddit day, so I think it’s incompetence rather than conspiracy.
No I had my reply pretty quickly in May. Now, they’re just stalling.
Even if there are alternative ways to see the content of the comments, making it more difficult to access that content still does something and isn’t pointless. The average person isn’t going to go through the trouble of checking the wayback machine or some other external archive, or download any add-ons or what have you to undelete or unedit comments. Not unless they already know that the comment said something they’re interested in enough to put in that extra effort, which is going to be a pretty small selection of people who might but probably won’t look into your comments unprompted to begin with anyway.
I think it is worth it to save the content on reddit. I don’t think it is worth it to save reddit. That’s why I’ve joined the ArchiveTeam’s effort, so you can safely delete and overwrite you posts and comments.
At least it helped delete a post for you? I guess?
Wow are they desperate.
