Ah, reddit

Reddit could try not being such a toxic environment to people and maybe they wouldn't do stuff like this. In this case given that the comment was from 3 years ago, the reason is most likely not because of the API scandal or AI scrapes or reddit going public, but rather some mod or other user was a persistent grade-A asshole to this poster, or started harassing them, or any of innumerable other possible toxic things, and they decided to just take their ball and go home.
I too torched all of my comments on reddit when I left, including the informative ones about niche subjects, and I'm not sorry about it.
- The comment was posted three years ago, but that's not (necessarily) the date of deletion. It could've been deleted much later than that, such as during the API exodus.

This was the point of the protest. Reddit is all over search engine results, especially Google. If people can't get their answers from a random Reddit search result, the Reddit listings will eventually be deprioritized in favor of other, more reliable sources.

I thought about maybe instead of deleting all my comments and posts I could instead replace them with AI rewrites to poison them for other AIs.
- i replaced mine with random gibberish. several times. over the course of a week.
  then i deleted them
  
  And then, when someone (after years) comes across the post and sees that someone had the same problem, they can't solve their problem because the comments were deleted. This is ridiculous.
- Outside of a web scraper, how sure are we that this poisons reddits actual data being sold to ai companies? It seems trivial for them to have an original comment field in the database that's invisible to users or just use backed up data. Or even an anonymized copy of all all original comments not linked to any account that is solely for AI training.
  
  Is it more or less likely to be poisoning the data being sold than doing nothing at all?

I overwrote my comments with a message that I was leaving Reddit for Lemmy in protest of the API debacle. I then deleted my account a week later after all the edits were done.
- I hope you didn't provide any useful info
  
  That's the point though
  
  Oh, I did. That was the whole point of overwriting the comments.

Reddit should not have an information monopoly on these things. We're deleting the messages so that Reddit's influence and degree of information control is reduced. If people cannot find answers to some of their obscure problems because of that, then they are acceptable collateral damage.

I'm still on Reddit, and once in a while I manually overwrite all my comments that are older than a month. 95% of my comments don't have a real value, and whatever I find interesting or insightful ends on my personal Web site. It's my information, and if I think I brainfart something that would be helpful for someone, I add it to space that I control. This was true even before the whole API fiasco.

When commenting on Reddit I always make sure to write garbage i would say in a bar, not something actually useful to anyone.
If there is somewhere a LLM trained on this data, good luck 🫡
Meanwhile on Lemmy, it's only high tier philosophical thought.
Do the same, fuck Reddit. 🤣

I didn't realize that it's already been 3 years since the API fiasco. Time really does fly...
- I could be wrong but I don't think it's been 3 years, they just deleted an older comment of theirs.
  
  Yeah, just a joke about the date. I also forgot that Reddit doesn't mark the date that the post was deleted, just when it was created.
- April Fools? It hasn't really, has it?
  
  No, just a joke about the date of the deleted post in relation to OP's complaint. We're coming up on the 1 year mark this summer.

it might be an unpopular oppinion here,
but deleting posts & comments was overly petty.
i just stopped browsing reddit,
thats not inconveniencing other users and imo more impactfull anyway.
- I don't think it was petty, Reddit as a platform made clear that they don't respect their user base and don't deserve control over the data built by and for the community. Reddit is nothing without its users and data, leaving the platform and deleting posted content after what they did sends a clear and proportional message imo.
- Getting rid of API access was one thing. It was entirely another when Spez was dripping with "Get back to work you unpaid mods! I need to get rich!". That's when I turned to fuck spez.
- too bad.. inconveniencing other users was also part of the point. Not sure how not doing anything, but not deleting it has more impact.. def. feels like alot less.
  Guess you cant use reddit reliably anymore for searching for stuff, too bad. Use a different platform or hope it has the chance to grow and is less shitty.
  Sorry you are so inconvenienced for continuing to use reddit, otherwise.. why would you care?
- I kind of agree. Part of the point was that they don't want AI trained on their posts. It's not clear that this actually accomplishes that but it at least has a chance of working.
  
  Yeah, I'm sure they're able to get older snapshots with the data, so my motivation was never to prevent training - which I couldn't care less tbh - but it was exactly to diminish Reddit's perceived value.
  Before the controversy, the platform was even more useful than Google to me, and I think this puts the whole community in a bad situation. They chose profit over openness, and like other social networks, started gatekeeping the content we generated. It won't surprise me if the platform, like many before, starts requiring signing in to read content in the near future.
  If I could just dump the content I created, in context, somewhere open and not controlled by Reddit, I would have done it instead of deleting it. The internet archive, search engine indexers, and other private crawlers have a lot of this "deleted" data, so I think worrying about AI training is a waste of time after the data is made public.
- Honestly people underestimate how valuable modern comments are. Not to mention you are no longer creating activity so parts of Reddit die a little.
- Lol, what's the problem with inconveniencing Reddit users? That's the whole point! Get more users to feel shitty about the site and be frustrated with it, turning elsewhere for answers. If they cannot find them, then that's their problem!
- If anyone’s petty it’s spez/reddit. Users are reacting to that pettiness. And are 100% justified.
- Is that meant to be a poem or something, lol