As I write this I literally have a script ( https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite ) running deleting all posts and comments I made so I can delete my accounts and leave them with nothing. The last couple of days they have been prompting people to provide identification documents to access their accounts. This is going to start becoming more prevalent on platforms. I always hated the site but that’s crossed the line for me. So purpose of this post is just to give people a heads up while they still have access if they want to remove their data and / or delete the peice of shit from their life once and for all.
you should all know that reddit can, and has, restored comments that have been “shredded” by tools like this so they can be used to train AI. they can obviously restore deleted content as well, because it’s never deleted, just marked as deleted in the database.
That’s illegal under GDPR, if true
If you have tangible evidence of this claim, please document it online and report it to the government
That would first require you to identify yourself.
At the very least deleting a comment only removes your name and doesn’t delete the comment/post. At least on my permabanned account.
You should email their data privacy officer and request them to delete it under the laws of GDPR.
Document it before and after and every correspondence.
If your data isn’t gone in 6 months, publish everything you’ve documented in a blog post. Post it here to Lemmy and email the government.
They’ll get fined millions or over a billion Euros. The EU doesn’t fuck around with these violations.
Your name shows up as deleted and the post stays up if you try to delete a post not account.
People should seek to change their local laws to prohibit or severely limit this sort of things too, besides seeking alternatives. If only seeking alternatives, the person should soon run out of those too, if not even be considered a criminal for doing so.
Your deleted posts are still archived and actively being used to train AI and being sold to 3rd parties. Reddit has that data forever. All you are doing by deleting them is denying actual humans access to them.
All you are doing by deleting them is denying actual humans access to them.
Okay, and? Actual humans using Reddit still directly profits Reddit and reinforces its hegemony. OP is still making a small but direct impact regardless of how entitled you ostensibly feel to their work.
Exactly, it’s still important to take that content down
Just pointing it out to OP that deleting your posts isn’t some magic “you don’t have my data anymore” button. By all means, do whatever you can to hurt reddit, I just want people to understand what is actually happening when they click that delete button.
I know of one Redditor, who did a monthly edit on his posts and comments with an app that did not delete content, but replaced it with gibberish.
I think people here know, but your comment leads people to misinterpret your intention as trying to discourage people from removing deleting stuff from reddit.
So the site becomes less useful to the masses, this can only help it die faster.
That’s illegal under GDPR, if true
If you have tangible evidence of this claim, please document it online and report it to the government
my posts we’re almost all garbage so im fine
And a human is choosing to remove their comment. A comment they made and decided they don’t want to be easily visible anymore.
I don’t think actual humans really care about my opinions much
I probably would’ve noticed if they hadn’t banned me two weeks ago for unspecified “actions taken by my account” less than a week after I resurrected a sub for parents/caregivers of kids with a rare disorder.
So… Good riddance I say.
Dropping redact here for if you’d like to take it a step further. This caches copies of all your comments and posts for you on your personal device while editing all your reddit interactions to unusable garbage.
No more LLM training material
As I write this I literally have a script running deleting all posts and comments I made so I can delete my accounts and leave them with nothing
Hello. A former DevOps here. When you upload something to a web platform, chances are it’s going to stay there no matter how badly you try to “delete” or “edit” it.
This is due to the way database for social media platforms are engineered. When you click the “delete” button, the record is simply marked as “hidden from view” rather than effectively deleted (in order to illustrate this, picture a sheet of paper written with a pen; the so-called “post deletion” is merely that pen adding a cute “hide this” text at the bottom of that sheet; the sheet of paper still exists, and so does everything that was written to it before).
This script you’re using does nothing too special; it’s simply programmed to try and mass-“edit” (also won’t effectively edit the original records) before clicking the “delete post” button in a controlled, timely manner (so not to trigger Reddit’s bot detection algorithms). At no moment it have access to the physical data centers controlled by Reddit, so you can’t possibly edit/remove the posts from their database entries.
Whoever controls this database (Reddit admins and their automated systems) can revert the database entry and voila, the post is public again, regardless of your will.
Even if the record were effectively removed from the database entries, it wouldn’t be able to remove from the backup files. If the database were fused with the old backup, your post would be up again.
Also, chances are your posts are already part of the mathematical mashup comprising the weights of LLMs out there; in order to make the LLMs to “forget” your posts, it must be trained all over again with a training data containing none of your posts. And of course the clanker corporations won’t do that, at least not out of their goodwill.
The only way to hopefully get Reddit (and clankers) to actually forget your posts, is by invoking things such as GDPR’s “right to be forgotten”. Reddit may not respect your will when you click a decorative “delete post” button, but they have to comply with things like EU laws, or they’ll face legal consequences for not doing so. Although… you’d likely need a lawyer in order to enforce GDPR’s (or your country’s equivalent law) clauses. Needless to say, I am not a lawyer, it’s just that this matter requires a legal solution rather than a technical solution.
While all this is true, it’s still worth it to edit/delete the content, so reddit doesn’t continue getting value from showing it to other users
I think their point is that Reddit can revert edits and deletions, and they’ve been known to do so.
From what I can tell they have not done that with the posts I deleted a few years ago, so I would still recommend trying.
Exactly.
I’d love to see some stats on the drop in active users after each of these sort of blunders they’ve pulled.
They just fill them back in with more bots
And traffic too, since they’ve begun to require login. I have no idea what they are doing? But it seems to include panicking. 🤣
Welp, i was signed into old reddit, and now it’s flipped over to new. Fuck spez.
And goddamn, but the ads are out of control.
Old reddit seems to have broken completely, hasn’t it.
Maybe edit posts instead to garbage. They don’t know and it can mess up AI training.
I left because the suspension and bans were for the most mild shit. It’s not a site meant for children , yet they treat it like it is. I’m not trying to harass people or anything, but I should be able to type the word “ass” without a suspension or ban. Nanny site
Was site banned for saying Putin should be dealt with after he took Crimea. Talk about sour milk.
The last couple of days they have been prompting people to provide identification documents to access their accounts.
I know almost nothing about this, but from a couple quick searches, it seems they’ve been doing this for maybe a month or two to accts that seem suspicious, such as non-Reddit bots or spam accts, etc.
I could be wrong, but so far it doesn’t seem to be anything near a site-wide thing.
best bet is editing so its misinformation while looking similar in structure
does it delete the posts in the backend?
There’s also a Firefox extension that can delete everything. Set up is just a few clicks.
I really think it’s nice that you’re trying to contribute positively, but I’m also a little bit exhausted after watching people post these kind of tools from almost a decade. Because it gives people false hope, and it continues to underscore the false belief that this somehow has the result that you programmed it to have.
You actually cannot remove anything. And reddit will just revert your posts… They’ll all say “deleted user” but they will not show the “vandalized” comments they’ll all go back to the way they were. The automated tools to detect/prevent people doing this damage on their way out have been in existence for more than 10 years.
Literally the only way is to stop using the damn product.
