I nuked my Reddit accounts today. Deleted all comments and posts, then the accounts themselves. The tool I used showed each comment as it was deleted, and it was bittersweet.
I watched old gaming and movie discussions I barely remember appear and then get flagged as deleted. Communities I once participated in and then moved on as the years past flashed by. I remembered how I felt back then, and then watched them scroll on into oblivion.
Now I feel…I guess it’s grief. Sadness for that part that’s gone. Sadness that it’ll never be there again. Like footprints on a beach wiped away by the tide. It’s like it never happened. There is no trace.
And I feel anger. Mad that it came to this. Mad that I let a corporation have so much of my time and thoughts. Mad that they made it clear my life was nothing but a product to them.
It’s over now. Time for a new chapter.
Anyone else have strong feelings about losing a part of the past like this?
here’s a question, wouldn’t it be more impactful to encourage users to redact with a protest statement promoting fedverse first?
assuming they’re doing a 30 day backup scheme then this becomes part of their working set going forward. messing with the data in this way especially if we can do it in volume might make it harder for LLMs to extract useful information from our noise.
we then can then start deleting our posts as a second protest after that.
thoughts?
I really just wanted to be done and gone from reddit, to be honest. My reaction when something like this happens isn’t to make a big scene. I just delete my content and vanish into the ether. Only time I actually made a farewell post was Facebook, and that was just to let my friends/family know how to continue to contact me. With Twitter I just nuked my posts and killed the account.
Reddit can probably filter/censor any sort of fediverse spam anyway, so it just seemed like extra steps at this point.