I deleted my reddit accounts completely by the first day of the APIpocalypse, and I removed all of the posts I had written under the principle that anything I had created was for the communities, which I saw as being destroyed by reddit’s moves. The content and moderation are the only source of value to social networks. I didn’t want what I had been doing for the past decade-plus to continue to be leveraged for monetization.
One person had replied that there are non-reddit affiliated archiving services that have been storing reddit content so deleting posts is ultimately useless. The site the person linked was what looked like a service catering to academic researchers, but O have since lost the link.
Does anyone know of such a site?
Do you mean web.archive.org ?
Everything is archived some place or another anyway.
The point of erasing your content on Reddit is to lower the value of the site and be a pain in their ass.
People shouldn’t erase their account. Not ever. Not until you are sure they won’t keep restoring your content. Keep erasing your restored content, take screenshots beforegand, and report them under GDPR / Cali law. When they’ll be forced to comply, then we can erase our account.
It wasn’t archive. It was a site that was specifically storing reddit threads in a queryable manner. Unfortunately, I didn’t explore the particular site enough. Ideally, I’d like to be able to pull an arbitrary month’s worth of /r/politics, and ideally only select posts with more than 30 replies or some upvote/downvote threshold.
As an aside, was it confirmed that they were restoring content? When I was doing it, I was using a python script that just grabbed all posts and comments for a given user name, overwrote the data with some ipsum text, and then deleted it. Sometimes, even when I’d finally get the post count down to zero, I’d find I still had some posts the following day.
It turned out that the api wasn’t showing posts from subreddits that had gone dark. So if a sub you posted in was dark when you were running your script, it wouldn’t be able to see/delete those posts until the sub opened back up. It made it look like there was something sketchy going on, but at least in my case it was just two types of protests clashing.
I haven’t read an official study about it, but I’ve seen random posts and comments of mine poping back here and there with no apparent link in time or subreddit.
Let me know if you find what you’re looking for, I’m interested :)
There were a few efforts in datahoarders to archive stuff before July 1st. I believe the correct search term to find them would be “redarc”.
Here’s one project: https://github.com/Yakabuff/redarc
Search for the pushshift archives. They are big files containing all the posts and comments made for each subreddit. I used them to make a better website for reading AskHistorians.
Please let us know if you find it. I’m interested as well.
Unddit is one. Also reveddit and pushshift.
