By all means, you do you. But here is how I see it.
I wrote it, it's my content and I will delete it if I want to. The value and knowledge there deposited comes not from the text itself, but from who I am as a person, my years of study and experience. Reddit doesn't own either, nor has any right to profit from my labor. If anyone wants anything from me they can ask me directly elsewhere. Whatever is worth preserving for posterity's sake I will systematize and publish in books. Whatever of value is worth sharing and distributing I will do so out of my own volition, on the platforms of my choosing and under the conditions I agree upon. Fuck Spez.
i still get the point what OP wants to say but i have mostly memes so i dont really think about it. Even if you "delete" your stuff it gets only marked as "removed". i think there where some cases where reddit did want the deleted stuff back and reverted it. when i get it correctly the CEO did edit some comments but could revert that back too. Those cases make me feel like that the stuff i post is not mine anymore, but i will try the best i can to make reddit not usable, even if it means being a complete asshole.
i wrote that elsewhre a few minutes ago:
it is better to change the comments to nonsense than to delete it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/146lloj/protip_if_you_replace_the_content_of_your/
": if you replace the content of your posts/comments with nonsense, you'll make Reddit Inc. (including its CEO) lose money."
"There's a good chance that those API price changes were motivated by large businesses using Reddit to train their large language models (LLMs) with. Stuff like GPT-3, Google's BERT, Facebook's Galactica, stuff like this. In other words, your content will be used to train bots. (It is, already.)
Those models can be "poisoned" with random, machine generated nonsense. Poisoned data is worse than useless: it makes the model worse. So for each person replacing their Reddit content with nonsense, those businesses will be willing to pay Reddit Inc. less and less for API access."
"Here is a mini-tutorial on how to do this. It's for desktop users but you'll likely be able to do the same from a phone browser.
If you don't like Zompist's gen and/or Power Delete Suite, you can use any generator and/or Reddit mass edition tool of your choice."
and yes, i am somewhat still on reddit but i think i do more against them when my app does not work anymore (to spread lemmy or information) i will follow this process
The point is to put your uniquely provided information somewhere else, like Lemmy. Google will figure out how to prioritize this information eventually. Delete it from reddit so that it's no longer the internet's repository of information.
Guess it depends what you've been doing. I only make memes, shitposts and stupid comments, so I don't think that makes a difference either way.
However, by mass-editing their own comments, one can fill up a good chunk of Reddit with some specific message. So that's a good argument for.
You're not the first person I've seen make this argument, and it's definitely a difficult situation.
End of the day though, this line of argument essentially allows Reddit to hold us hostage. While it is unfortunate that this will be in some ways harmful to the internet as a whole, it's ultimately our content, and we have the right to remove it if we wish.
That said, I do think that, if anyone has a history of being particularly helpful on Reddit, they should consider backing up their comments, and possibly reposting the relevant information to a blog or something similar, or maybe even here on Lemmy.
I've been thinking about what to do with my Reddit account. I'm leaning towards leaving up my comments (for reasons you stated), but adding a disclaimer with a link to Lemmy.
That way, if anyone does still find my posts useful or entertaining, they know where to go for more.
That's actually a great idea!
Fwiw I've definitely not contributed anything of note on reddit (low effort 2-sentence hot takes) so I don't think it matters to me
What I have done is mass edit all my comments to Lemmy equivalents of subs I used to frequent, hopefully that's of more use than the dross I used to leave on there (and will leave on here for that matter lmao)
Deleting and nuking posts and comments are only distroy what we and the entire reddit community built over the years and it will be a huge loss for all of us.
Reddit has already been destroyed by the actions taking place currently by spez and the site admins. There is no saving it anymore, not in any way that matters.
You're right, it is a huge loss but don't put that blame on the users deleting comments, that blame lies squarely on Reddit. The way I see it they don't deserve the content we have provided them and the right thing to do is rebuild that information elsewhere. Here on the fediverse for example.
To keep your content on Reddit is to encourage web traffic to Reddit, which makes them money.
It's fine to delete and rebuild.
As long as old comments are there people will land there. After Google indexes the deletion, people will land on Lemmy, and we can engage in providing up-to-date solutions.
Maybe a happy medium is to take you best/most popular posts and repost it in here under a similar community, then edit your Reddit post to point to Lemmy for additional info...
This is a much better answer.
Reddit's only real value is the contribution of users. Reddit got so big because it had so many users posting their information. It will continue to be big so long as it's the place where you can find answers to nearly anything.
Move the content, and you'll move the value. That's the only way most people will ever change what site they browse while pooping
I respect your two cents and politely disagree.
I'm looking at a CEO who somehow thinks my content is his to profit off of, and I decide that I won't be a part of it. It most definitely will hurt users, yes. A lot of my posts were top results in Google for my work field, and that knowledge is lost because I edited and then removed all my posts and comments.
But it is the only course of action available to me, if I want to keep in charge of my content, and who gets to monetize it.
I'm thinking of saving all of my comments on my own webserver and then deleting them That way they are at least not gone forever.
Agree with OP.
I've posted original content on subreddits meant for people with mental disorders. I also helped people find solutions for software-related problems. I don't feel that screwing them over to make a statement to Reddit's CEO is the right way to go.
I plan to delete my Reddit account and avoid visiting the site as much as I can. If enough people do the same thing and use alternatives instead, that's enough of a statement to me.
You can post the comment elsewhere, such as a similar community here, blog posts on something like Medium, etc.. Then use PowerDeleteSuite to mass edit your comments to point to the new home.
That's what I'm going to do I think. I understand the pain from removing comments that have and would have helped people, but reddit will continue to profit off of that information, which they absolutely do not fucking deserve. Those people that were helped, have already been helped. New users seeking information will have to search elsewhere
Something has to be done to the existing data in order to get more people away from the platform, and there is an absolute plethora of information so I don't even think the people doing this will have a large enough impact as we'd like (though, I could be wrong in estimating how many people are rewriting their comments). At least, future content creators have already moved away so a lot of "new" information shared on reddit will be on the decline, or less of an incline
If I've written any guides or posts that are helpful, I will repost it over here and edit the original post on reddit to remove the content and redirect them here which will also inform more people about the fediverse. The people who needed the help have already seen it, and anyone else seeking the information will hopefully be pulled away from reddit and to a better platform. There -has- to be a point at which people move away from reddit for information, so that other places like kbin can grow into a more suitable replacement with just as much, and eventually, more knowledge
Yeah, much of my comments/posts were technical support stuff for specific software vendor subreddits. I've created accounts on three different official forums hosted by these vendors this week. They're not nearly as widely used as reddit now, but hopefully as the useful content moves, so will the people that need it.