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Reddit experimenting with blocking mobile browsers
(old.reddit.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Bruh, I agree. I'm super interested to see the fallout of the community from this. I know it's super easy to say "fuck /u/spez", but how many people will truly pull through to delete their accounts and/or stop using reddit?
Already deleted any accounts I had. Overwrote all comments with this tool too.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
@gravalicious @Sintamo
I did this as well. Sad to see the content I created disappear, but at least now I can start reposting to a whole new fediverse 😅
That's a positive at least. I'm still ripping data from my accounts, but afterwards bye bye!
Make sure it actually overwrote all your comments. PowerDeleteSuite doesn't respect the edit rate limit. I used a fork which runs much slower but respects the limit.
Also, it's a good idea to wait several days between the editing and deleting your account. Many users on reddit were suggesting that reddit holds on to pre-edit text for a while. Obviously archives hold onto it forever, but if your goal is to deny your content to reddit, that's orthogonal.
Gotta weigh in here and say overwriting comments like that can hurt the end user more than it hurts Reddit. A lot of traffic to Reddit is intentional, with posts and comments showing up in search results from ddg/google. I know I've found my own posts from troubleshooting the same issue years later. Sure, delete/overwrite comparatively useless comments and posts, but leave up other useful content and use an ad blocker instead. That will hurt them more than deleting content, but still allow others to find the info they need.
It's true that it will hurt people long term but it will drive traffic away more than deleting the inane stuff. No website like that should be such a central repo when it's unstable like this. The internet has survived link rot and info loss before.
You're not wrong, but also I'd like to move away from the world of "site:reddit.com" being the go-to troubleshooting/advice-seeking search, and my posts turning up in such searches would be driving traffic to reddit, which I don't want to do. I also don't want my account history used for advertising purposes, and across the life of an account I tend to share more personal specifics than I'm comfortable with sharing in aggregate.
But you're not wrong, either. I can see both sides of this one.
The whole blackout thing is super interesting, and to my knowledge it's the biggest protest of it's kind since Reddit hit the mainstream. I can't imagine it kills Reddit soon though. It's just the start of a brain-drain that will make Reddit lose relevancy over the next 5 to 10 years, and they'll wonder where they went wrong. Even I'll probably keep my alt account there, but the days of actually contributing will end for many.
But also fuck spez ;)
I deleted my 10 year and 5 year old accounts. I didn't purge my posts and comments, as I doubt they're truly deleted from the database and I wanted to leave that content for people who aren't reddit. I've moved to the fediverse, andi think I'm here to stay.
I've heard editing comments is likely more effective, but it's hard to say. I'm guessing they take regular backups anyway, so maybe that's not really a thing anymore.
Regardless, I'm planning on replacing all of my comments with something like "screw you Reddit, use Lemmy instead" or something to that effect. I have a ton, so I'll need a script to do that, which will probably get blocked anyway.
You can user Power Delete Suite for this purpose; that's what I did. It missed some comments/posts, but it got enough that I could go through and manually edit the stragglers.
For those who just want to edit comments to random letters and then delete, redact also works (but requires login) and might be more thorough.
Idk really if my copypasta about deleting my comments/posts in protest of the reddit api changes, and about lemmy, will do any good (I suspect the account may just get quickly banned), buuuuut it sure did feel good to do. I'm glad to no longer be supporting that website in any way, shape, or form. Although I understand the people who think it's better to leave their comments/posts up for the other users, too - that's valid also.
Ideally, it could just let me include a small message at the bottom that recommends switching away from Reddit.
IDK though, I'll have to decide. I'm definitely deleting my accounts though.
There's some communities on Reddit that don't yet exist in other places; so I'm going to continue browsing those rarely; but once they move somewhere else I'm moving with them.
I thought I'd be making a long-tail exit as well, but I've been looking at my feed of mostly niche subs with an especially critical eye this week and concluded that even there, the signal-to-noise ratio had hit the point the web did as a whole that initially drove me to Reddit.
I'll still use it to declutter Google results, but I expect that utility to decline as helpful, detailed posts become fewer and fewer. There's still some distance to Facebook-level network lockdown.