The reddit blackout is even more effectivte than expected! 5177/8829 (~60%) of subreddits are still dark [1] and the posts per minute are down to 1000 from 1400 [2].
This is huge. Subreddits were supposed to be back up yesterday. I personally missed Reddit the first day but now I am super comfortable here.
Glad to have found a new place to hang out!
Edit: Reddit has 100k subs, 60% out of those who officially signed up
When you lose 30% of your users because you got greedy about how ‘unprofitable’ your own app was, it’s gonna hurt.
True punishment would be active, content rich posters zeroing out their posts and comment history. By doing so, the Google searches - which currently refer a ton of traffic to the site - will start to fade. The body of knowledge- users knowledge, not Reddit’s- is what drives new traffic to the site. I plan to remove my contributions later this month, presuming nothing changes.
15 year redditor, though only with ~250k karma. Scrubbed the crap out of my account. I’ll probably still use reddit on desktop for as long as old.reddit exists, but for mobile I’m definitely trying out alternatives.
11 year redditor here, I scrubbed my account too.
12 year account myself
I’ve been on Reddit for 13 years, and I’m hesitant to remove everything, in case I want to revisit some of my old posts/comments. Is there a way to archive your own content?
I left Reddit but didn’t scrub any posts. Seemed a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Although I do understand why others thought otherwise.
Huffman has recently made it clear that he wants to monetize user data, so I think that’s a good reason to delete it, imho. I can still understand leaving it up as a courtesy to other users, but deleting all your content is a valid action imho.
https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
Yes this is the way to do it. It includes everything on your account even if you’ve clicked Delete on it.
Power Delete Suite will offer the option of backing your stuff up locally.
Until the 30th you have the API, write up a little script. Either get the raw data or store a snapshot of the post on the website
Yup, send them a GDPR data request. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043048352-How-do-I-request-a-copy-of-my-Reddit-data-and-information-
I used Power Delete Suite to back up and delete my content. Note that there seems to be a bug in the archive export process though. I had to follow the advice on this issue to pull my full CSV backup.
Just had a go with Power Delete Suite, but the export is kind of minimal, so I think I’ll roll my own with the API, while the clock ticks.
Yeah PDS is a good start but has some issues, if you’re comfortable with the API you’ll probably do better there.
Behold, yesterday’s quick ‘n’ dirty Python project: https://github.com/toonvandeputte/reddit_archive
Nice!
How do I give Reddit gold? Hopefully this works🥈
In all seriousness “this is the way”
Same here, going to do it a few days before the API change just in case they pull some crap to prevent mass scrubbing losses
GDPR (for EU users) and CCPA (for Californian users) both have the right “to be forgotten”, which means they must delete all your data upon request. Even if they block the third-party bulk deletion sites that use their API, they should still delete all your data upon request, at least if you’re in a jurisdiction with such a requirement.
It isn’t that powerful. They don’t have to remove comments or posts if they don’t contain any personal data that you can be identified with.
Don’t they have to delete all “my” data though? I guess I’m not sure of the specific wording of the laws, but at my workplace we delete all data that’s directly related to the user (data they created, plus any other data collected or logged about them), even if it doesn’t contain any personal data. The systems that handle this are super complex so I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of companies don’t handle it well.
Yeah, but with what they’ve pulled off so far they have been perfectly following the playbook for a “data unlawfully retained” scandal for reddit. Some GDPR fine.
/r/DataHoarder was encouraging that last I checked.
Man, you know it’s bad when even a sub based on data preservation is saying, “Nuke it”
I wonder if they moved here too. Would be nice, really enjoyed being part of that community.
It’s a pitty there aren’t many (any?) subreddits that are “officially” endorsing a specific community in lemmy (or magazine in kbin) for migration.
The few I’ve seen that have promoted alternatives usually just say something like “lemmy,” or provide a whole host of alternatives, resulting in a wide spread across platforms for the few that do migrate.
I bet any post encouraging a migration would get yanked very quickly! The best bet is to pm people who were quality contributors to the sub, to encourage them to continue in a platform that’s open.
Isn’t that ironic
They’ve already got a copy, I guess.
A copy of all reddit posts & comments is being passed around there. Everything up until March 2023 or so. Unfortunately no community here yet.
Anyone knows more?
Edit: See https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ and the explanation by r/DataHoarder (linked somewhere below)
I think reusing that data by anyone would be a very shady move. Not everyone who posted on reddit wants their posts and comments to float around in various places without their consent. I know posting online always poses the risk that what you post will be archived somewhere but I still think no one should build any new service on that data.
You are absolutely right. But the data is out there anyways. Reddit keeps copies as much as Google and other creepy spiders. The amount of aggregated and unified knowledge these dump contain is astonishing. For personal research or just preservation.
There are plenty of sites where you can already see old, deleted comments. So barely a new risk.
I’m wondering if that data could be given to archive.org for posterity (if legal of course).
Why not sooner then later, holding out gives reddit hope.
There are a few useful extensions and browser plugins that help automate editing your past comment history and posts to be blank, the same tool then deletes the post and comment for you.
Don’t leave anything behind IMO. I know I did not.
Kind of sad to lose all that knowledge though. I wish we had a backup.
There is, the-eye.eu has a full archive up until march 2023 https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ (about 2TB total).
You can download individual subreddits too.
See here for more details (reddit unfortunately…): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/historic_reddit_archives_ongoing_archival_effort/
I mean there’s always archive.org and the various other internet caches that contain a large portion of Reddit’s knowledge.
The other significant factor is that even their recently-slashed valuation was based on some degree of projected user growth. If you’re trying to IPO and your growth has flattened, it’s bad bad news. If your engagement numbers are actively moving backwards, that’s catastrophic.
Looking at posts per minute seems like a great way to judge the effect though. I anticipate Reddit, Inc. will attempt to downplay the effect by focusing on numbers that take engagement out of the picture, like Monthly Average Users. If you touch the site once in the month, even by absent-mindedly clicking on a Google result, you’d get counted in that for June. And they wouldn’t report the July numbers until August because, golly it’s an incomplete month. And by then, their hope is that the world will have moved on.
Internally, I’m sure there aware of the impact. But externally, I believe they’ll cherrypick favorable metrics to try and control the narrative for the investing & advertising communities.
You pretty much described every corporation in the history of mankind. This is what they always do.
They lost more than 30% of their actual users. Of the remaining traffic a portion is just bots. Maybe 10%? Maybe 30%? No idea, but not all of the remaining traffic is real people.
The test will be if they actually lost the users or just lost them for a few days.