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The most liberating decision: just deleted my Reddit account
Just deleted my Reddit account. I was a Digg addict, and thereafter way to absorbed in Reddit for my own good.
Wanted to thank Christian for a brilliant app (if he ever was to see this: you poured your soul into that thing. Thank you for all you did). I’ve now deleted the app on all devices and am moving on!
Am looking forward to a fresh change.
I really like the feel of this place. Low key, easy to navigate and not crowded. And the civil conversations just blow my mind!
PS: sincerely appreciate the invite link!
I've moved on in a similar way. Tildes and Hackernews haven't quite filled the void yet but I feel good about the decision overall. I hope to see this platform grow, I think it has great potential and the quality of discussion has been refreshing so far.
I scrubbed and deleted my account, then deleted Apollo. Thanks for everything, Christian. You really did make one of the best apps I've ever used.
I feel like I've been pouring Tildes and Lemmy and HackerNews (and a little Mastodon) into a reddit sized bucket, trying to fill it up. And they can't - there are just too many awesome, bespoke communities to be replaced. It was moving seeing all the subreddits flying by on the "going private" Twitch stream tonight - all the work that went into them, all that content potentially lost.
But there's too much motivation from too many brilliant people not to fill that bucket again someday. They will build something better. And hell, in the meantime, maybe my reddit bucket was getting too big anyway :)
That's a beautiful way to put it, my recommendation is to throw also some Discord channels to your Reddit bucket. I did my homework and looked up for ways to stay connected with the communities I care about there, and a few had a Discord. I'm not familiar in any way with that app, but it can be useful perhaps as the medium in which I get to know where are this people going to be next. So, it's better than nothing.
I like discord, I've been using it for a few years and I made some friends :) something I wasn't able to do on reddit, but the problem is, it's not indexed by search engines, and you'd need to discover the said discord server and they aren't always available publicly, and discord's search isn't all that good, so finding content will be harder. I personally think lemmy will be a great platform if it gets more users.
You're better than me in Discord then, please teach me your ways.
I'm interested in where the crowd from the sub I follow will end up. That's why I brought the Discord server to the conversation: it would work great to get to know the new site they'll nurture to become like the sub, better than to be lost until a platform emerges. But I understand it can't replace Reddit.
well, like I said the main problem is the server discovery, from my experience I've found that some of the best servers I'm in were recommended to me by other people, I've had some luck with disboard but it's not my preferred way to find a server, you can also just google and see if you can find any. servers on discord tend to be more... distributed, unlike reddit where there are a few big subreddits for each topic, I've found there to be many servers for the same topics (probably because it's easier to start a discord server than a subreddit) so I'd suggest joining different servers to see which servers you like, and participate in those. there also is a bit more drama on discord than reddit (or atleast I've seen more) so sometimes stuff happens lol.
Discord can be awesome, and they do a good job of providing the tools to manage communities. However, in many ways it is already much more closed down than reddit is. As @cuteFox already said, information discord isn't indexed by search engines. So where reddit has dark patterns where it tries to force people to create an account, discord doesn't make the information findable in the first place.
So where with reddit an effort can (and is!) being undertaken to archive it, with discord that's next to impossible.
Of course it depends on how you use discord. But as a resource I often try to approach discord as a complimentary tool for live discussion where the actual information is available outside of the platform as well.
My early experiments with discord left me feeling it was the wild west, under-moderated, with basically no oversight whatsoever once you entered a server? Am I wrong?
The smaller servers have better moderation, but the bigger servers definitely feel like the wild west in my opinion. I've struggled to really find anything permanent on discord.
Personally, my Reddit bucket was far too large. The void I've felt while not using it the last few days is eye-opening at best, horrifying at worst. It became the default 'what do now?' for me and only now am I realizing just how much I let it replace things that actually help me build a life for myself. Here's to less doomscrolling, eh?
Yeah, just gotta appreciate what it was and in the future hopefully we keep moving on to better things less profit focused and more community driven
I ran a script to do this a couple months ago, and now my user page is blank. But I’m still finding old comments and posts from many years ago.
What script did you use? I know that I had to put the shreddit command in an indefinite loop for it to eventually grab everything.
I don't remember honestly. Just one I found linked here or on reddit.
Most of Reddit's listings (ie. a user's comments, posts, saved posts, etc) only allow you to see the most recent 1000 items -- beyond that, it won't show you anything, even if you delete/unsave newer items. To delete older comments/posts, you'll probably have to go through Reddit's data-request system, which will give you a CSV of all of your old posts/comments. I'm not sure if the existing scripts are built to work with this, but it should be possible to delete everything using that.
Appreciate ya. Thankfully I kicked off that data request process with reddit last week when I realized there were still old comments out there.
I'm holding out until after the blackout. I'll only stay as long as I can use RiF. If it does end up having to be shut down on July 1st, I'll mass edit all my comments and posts across both my accounts to something like "This content has been removed in protest of the API changes" and then delete the accounts (since deleting the account just removes the username associated with posts/comments, but not the actual post/comment).
After the free public API shuts down, I expect the tools to mass-edit and delete your reddit content will no longer function.
The public API will still be available, just rate-limited. I believe it was 100 requests/minute, which isn't the worst. Besides, mass-edit/delete tools can (and probably will) just emulate a user login or use some other method even if the API shuts down.
I think they work by "logging in" as you, so they shouldn't really run into that issue because you'd be doing it on the main website, with your own unique identifier, not a generalized API key.
I'm not a tech guy or the guy who wrote any of those scripts though, so take my word with a grain of salt.
Yeah, if I decide to delete my account, I'm going this route and putting something across all comments in solidarity.
I would do that, but there's just so much on Reddit that I won't find elsewhere. Where else there's a vibrant community to discuss, in-depth, a multitude of niche interests such as MUD games, interactive fiction, several games, and MMORPGs? Where else will I get my dose of /r/hobbydrama? Make a question about arcane knowledge? Submit a /r/writingprompt about some silly idea I had, and get an awesome, well-written short story as an answer? Who will tell me in excruciating detail if the Ancient Greeks wore eyeliner, how they used it, for what purpose, what it was made of, and how much it cost?
I love Tildes, but I don't think it is suitable to become even close to some of the best parts of Reddit. Not because Tildes is bad, it is just different, it fills different needs, and that will always be the case.
I'm extremely happy to be here and I'm super excited to be a part of this community. I love the look and feel of Tildes, especially since it looks so similar to old-style Reddit which I LOVE.
However, yeah there's a ton of very niche subreddits I'll still browse on the web w/ RES for as long as possible. There's just no way, without people being able to request groups somehow, that tags will cover every possible niche community.
Where can I connect with people to discuss bonsai? Well bonsai could be it's own group, since it's so specific, but then it could be grouped with a larger group called "gardening". In reality, it's a hobby, so it can fit in ~hobbies... but hobbies is just so broad that any connection attempt to others will just slowly sink into the ether.
Without Reddit, the ONLY other places to connect with others to discuss bonsai is legit either Facebook or old-school forums. I'm still a part of a few forums, but I'd rather not have to be part of so many forums anymore. I'm hoping that maybe Tildes could slowly grow to cover some of these niche groups. Either way, I do love what we already have!
I haven't pulled the trigger yet but intend to. I need to go through my saved posts and bookmark links from them (as of the last few years that's how I've been bookmarking interesting links - using the "save" button on rif) first. I'm trying to decide whether I want to download my history or not; I wasn't a prolific poster or anything (mostly lurking) but it might be nice to have my comments/threads.
I agree with your sentiment. It’s so damn hard to let go of all that history and perceived value.
But then I realized that google would still be around to find the answers.
My account is now nuked, and am thrilled that there’s no looking back.
I felt the same way when I closed my Instagram and Facebook - relieved and thrilled there is no going back. I'm sure I will once I get there for Reddit, but in the mean time here I am creating a bookmarks folder that says "links I got from Reddit" lol. I didn't realize how much content I curated using Reddit!
It feels like the end of an era. Just read some of the comments here if you want to feel nostalgic. But anyway, it’s time.
Thanks for that.
I’m going to spend the rest of tonight ugly crying.
I fully agree. Looking back at these I kind of realized that I genuinely miss being active in some of the subreddits I was active in during middle school and high school, and how it feels disappointing to see the website become what it is today. It's almost like a slow betrayal with how reddit has gradually lost what made it seem special, and I didn't realize how bad things have become as I had been using third party clients and old reddit + RES.
While I hope Reddit reverses their decision, I honestly doubt they will.
It's now almost as long since I first joined Reddit as it was since I was born (about 1-2 year difference). Half my life on that site in some way or another. It really has been disappointing watching the enshitification slowly take over. All good things eventually, I suppose. Hoping I will take the opportunity to turn back to the things I've been neglecting because the dopamine hit isn't quite as instant.
Likewise if you're an Android RiF user, same scene going on over here.
I'm oddly still hesitating on deleting my account as its the only social media I really use. Think the biggest thing holding me back from moving away from Reddit was the r/manga subreddit. I love browsing that sub for new manga and enjoy reading the chapter discussions for the manga I follow. No other reddit alternative has anything similar and Tildes isn't really suited for that kind of content so I'll probably stick with reddit in the mean time. However, I am thinking of just creating a simple RSS reader that would let me see the r/manga feed but then also browse the chapter discussions without needing to be logged in.
Reddit has become so huge that this is a real problem. There's some specific hobbies or communities that doesn't have any alternative places.
Until these communities move elsewhere and everything stabilizes again there will always be something missing.
Yeah, I think the most ”fun” part of this will be trying to keep track of where different communities land.
Like, I’m just starting to get back into golf and sewing my own gear. I have a golf Discord but I don’t know where I’m going to find a new /r/myog community. I’m sure some are out there but I don’t know which place has critical mass yet.
I can also try posting about it in ~hobbies but I’m not super good at it and a lot of my value from the sub was seeing projects from other users and learning from them.
I'm always super hesitant about posting here haha, either making new topics or even just replying to posts/other people. I'm used to regular low-effort contributions on Reddit so coming here and trying to make meaningful contributions is something I need to get used to.
I’m glad you’re being thoughtful about it, at least!
We all have to start somewhere with changing how we interact with social media. I think what’s going on over here at Tildes is way more healthy for our long term communication skills.
It definitely is! I've already started changing the way I even text, moving away from short, line-by-line messages to sending longer messages with finished thoughts. I definitely enjoy the sort of community that Tildes is cultivating, can't wait to see where it goes in the future.
Not to be THE example of low effort here but I feel exactly the same way
I feel that. r/animesuggest and r/goodanimememes are two places I'm really looking for a replacement for
Similarly hesitant. What I’m wondering though is just how much the quality will decline.
I think it'll take a while for content to even decline. Tildes is technically still an Alpha product. That combined with the invite system means it's not something that will have insane growth super quickly that'll drown out the regular discussions.
I'm in the exact same boat as you. It's going to absolutely suck not having r/manga. That's how I get my recs, and I'm wary of other weeb communities these days, and their tastes and mine are usually wildly different.
I don't actually have a good way of even partway replacing that. I'm going to miss talking about little niche mangas with like-minded people.
I'm going to delete RIF from my phone tomorrow, which will pretty much eliminate 90% of my usage. In using Tildes over the past few days, my Reddit usage is already way down, so this transition might be easier than I initially thought.
I have been using Reddit to hand out Tildes invites. I have five of them! It's like Reddit gold, but actually valuable.
On the
RedditAlternativessub there was some people looking for a way in.That's how I got it! I wanted to repay the favor but I don't have any invites yet.
They'll come with time. Just remember to keep out trolls and spammers, so a little research to their past history won't hurt to ensure we're not allowing harmful (to deep discussions) behavior here.
Context: An r/ApolloApp thread that hit r/bestof where many users were showing proof of deleting their accounts. Another Relay user and I deleted ours in solidarity with them.
For some reason here's proof it's actually my account from inside the Relay app just before deleting. (Typo and all :-/ )
Nuked.
I wiped all but that one comment with redact.dev, and then bombs away! I'd have done it even sooner if it didn't take reddit so long to reply to my gdpr request for all my info. 14+ years there. It's just not what it was, it's likely never going to be what it could be, and I've run out of enough excuses to continue supporting an organization with such crooked management.
Here's to better times ahead.
Edit: Just realized I have no idea why I blurred my username. It's not like you can go look up the account! Old habits die hard.
I'm with you! On June 30, I'll be doing the same
I was there 30 mins ago, and it just feels off. Deleted my account because the demise is inevitable.
Deleted my main account after the dumpster fire that was the AMA, and my alt accounts the other day. One of those was my account of 11 years. Sad to see it go, but like you said, reddit feels off now.
Even if they do reverse the changes, I don't think I'm going to go back. They've shown what they think of the communties and people who dedicated their time, money and effort into making reddit what it is.
I deleted mine yesterday, though I haven’t been logged in for the past couple years. I’ve used the mobile website and, since I deleted my account, noticed the comments area looked slightly different (smoother, hard to explain), but also kept being told I had to log in to read replies to any top level comments, which has never been the case all that time I’ve been using Reddit logged out. I don’t know that that’s the kind of off you’re talking about, but my tin foil hat was coming out as it happened right after deleting my account.
I’m not the user you responded to, but I was on Reddit up until midnight EST tonight. Partly because I wanted to add to the sudden cliff of inactivity, partly because I thought I should be present for what will someday be an interesting piece of internet anthropology.
I can’t speak for what asstronaut* was going for, but the vibe was off tonight. I don’t know quite how to explain it, but the feeling of the user base wasn’t quite right.
I don’t know if enough people have already placed out or if Reddit has some bots out making it seem like everything is Stepford-ishly okay, but something is off.
It feels like the soul of Reddit isn’t there anymore. The admins have made a lot of decisions over the years that pissed a lot of people off but this one seems to be pushing way more people over the edge than any Reddit controversy I’ve seen in nigh on 13 years of near daily use.
Glad I wasn't the only one noticing the vibe being off. Lots of off topic comments/posts (more so than usual at least) and much fewer comments on posts.
A lot of it felt either bot-ish or facebook-level user-who-doesn't-quite-understand-how-things-worki-ish. I'm guessing it's the stuff that normally gets buried by higher quality content or that mods normally remove. I doubt it's Reddit bots but rather spam/repost bots that are still active. They've been everywhere lately.
Reddit was born out of corporate building hundreds of fake users and simulating real conversations to give a false representation of how much activity there was in order to lure real users in.
It’s totally in their playbook to do something like that now to convince as many users as they can that nothing is wrong.
I think a lot of people don't know or forget this. That is literally how reddit began. They knew no one would want to join a ghost town. It's the first thing wikipedia has to say about reddit's history iirc. Feel free to read the source. So they're clearly not concerned with crossing that line, and now with ChatGPT it'll be easier to do and more difficult for users to tell. I'd be very surprised to learn that they are not currently doing it.
For the lazy:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/
First part of the first comment:
Oof.
There's been a noticeable uptick in GPT-powered comments on the site in the last week, I assume admins have been pre-emptively ramping up artificial activity to make up for the dip in genuine activity.
Yes. You can just @ them like this @subvocal.
Excellent! Thank you! I had assumed there was a way, just hadn’t figured out the syntax yet.
/u/NaraVara didn't mention that /u/-tagging someone would also work. We have options!
I’ll be quitting Reddit on June 30 also. Not going to delete my account, but once Apollo dies, there won’t be much temptation to go back. I’m already pretty comfortable here on Tildes, so I won’t miss Reddit much.
Infinity might be able to stick around, as its FLOSS, albeit gimped, it won't be able to acsess NSFW content, which is more than just pr0n, and its the app ive been using for the last 2 years since I got my first phone, but even still, I'm branching out on what sites I visit, I'll be visiting reddit very seldomley
I spent a lot of time on Reddit following the Ukraine war and many of the most important (and most horrible) posts were NSFW. It's definitely not just pr0n. There's a lot of evidence of crimes where the only exposure in the English-speaking world is on Reddit, else it would just stay on RU/UA Telegram (and the occasional Twitter post). But Reddit probably dislikes that even more than they do porn given their reasons.
I’ve been mulling this over for a number of days (probably at least a week), and my initial thought was to linger around till the end of the month too… on the off chance that there would be change of heart.
But I checked out the site about an hour ago (and yes, I know that Sunday nights are not the most active), but the place, the vibe and the feel of it just felt off.
Then I saw that r/animetitties was going dark too… indefinitely.
Decision was made. And executed.
Deleted mine yesterday. It feels like a weight off my shoulders.
Right? It was weirdly liberating, watching the script tick through all my old contributions and overwrite and delete them one by one.
I just deleted my 12 year old account... Shout out to spez for helping cure my reddit addiction!!
I don't know if I'll ever actually pull the trigger. I might just settle with logging out and moving my 2FA somewhere else on my phone.
I realized all the karma I accumulated doesn’t count for anything in the real world.
In the end it’s more about having a sense of community than fake internet points.
Maybe it's different for everyone, but my total karma never really mattered. It was always the list of top comments and posts I was proud of, and tildes seems to offer the same.
Just deleted all the comments/posts I could. Reddit would not give me a full history on my 17 yo account but I went through New/Top/Controversial as well as search for my username on Google with site:reddit.com. Took me about ~3 hours with the help of a script to automate the deleting each comment.
Just deleted the account and uninstall Sync from my phone. End of an era.
I'm happy to migrate to tildes for discussions and squabble.io for image-based posts. That is everything I need!
Squabble io is good. But the lack of a way to mute, block or report a user or a subgroup is somewhat worrying. Earlier today we already saw a troll ther and a group named the donald.
That sucks to hear. At least the dev has been implementing changes quickly, I hope that a report feature comes out soon.
Some people have in protest over the years used scripts to go through their comments and rewrite them with a "This has been deleted as part of...".
Please don't do that. Reddit like all of the internet hosts obscure useful answers found nowhere else. In addition, there are many comments that would be useful but because the parent ran one of those scripts the response lack any context and you can't learn from them.
Because of reddit's policies, services like the waybackmachine often don't have a copy of those comments. With their actions towards pushshift any overwritten content will be very difficult for anyone to find.
And yet the entire problem right now is Reddit admins doing everything they possibly can to maximize their profit off of the content and moderation that their users have provided for free.
There's value in leaving your old content there for future visitors, sure, but there's also value in removing it. I feel like whether or not to nuke one's contributions on the way out is a pretty personal decision and I wouldn't judge anyone either way.
I'm with you, one of the best things about the internet is the rich archive of content you can find well after the fact. It's disheartening to run into just the thread you need only to find the critical responses missing.
If you wish to harm the platform's ability to monetize your content, I think just leaving gets you almost all of the way there. I see no need to eke out a little more and, in doing so, make it that much harder for a future user to find some obscure but highly relevant bit of information I said!
When I see people who have done that, I'd prefer if they have never commented in the first place no matter how informative it was. Once they had commented, others no longer needed to. If they hadn't another person probably would have written a reply, perhaps not as well written but if they don't delete it out of spite I consider it far more valuable.
Just did the same (more than 15 years...). I'm not sure why I was holding on to it. It's weird how we attribute value to arbitrary internet points.
Yeah, I think it messes me up a little bit. You get into this habit of regurgitating memes and inside jokes, and are you doing it because it's funny, or for the validation of people you don't know and will never meet?
Congrats! I’ll be deleting mine here in a few days. I stripped my posts and comments when they removed home feed sort a few months back. Switched to RiF and now boom.
Deleted all my posts and comments along with my alts earlier today. Hanging on to my main account for the moment, just in case. Just in case of what tbh I am not sure, maybe it's just reluctance to let go. I'll probably delete it by the end of the month if not before since I really don't expect there to be any reason not to.
I'll hang on to my Reddit account in case some chump wants to buy it off me lol, it's 13 years old with decent karma, maybe I can get a pizza and a few beers for it.
Really been liking the vibe at Tildes, between this and Dogs On Acid (a forum specifically for drum and bass and jungle music) I've got most of my Reddit hole filled.
I deleted my whole account when the word got out they were pursuing IPO. I'd considered it when the canary clause was pulled out of the TOS, but held on for that long. I'd been lurking with old.reddit via firefox w/ublockOrigin until the API debacle erupted, and then it was enough for me.
I didn't even wait for the blackout. I cut bait and have no intention of ever looking back. There comes a point where the decision makers go toxic, and then you just have to leave. I did the same to my twitter when Musk bought it.
Do not hang around when you see the signs. Do not presume things will change anymore than your job would miss you if you died on the way to work. When you are the product, your strongest power is cessation.
Yes, just did the same as well, at least, one of my two accounts. The remaining account had it's comment and post history wiped, and only kept it to continue moderating a small subreddit I am passionate about. Don't want to walk out on the rest of the team. The conversation here is of a far higher quality than the majority of Reddit. Hopefully it stays that way.
In an open letter to our subreddit today as we reopened, I likened 15 years of being a Redditor to being a frog boiled alive. It took the events of the past few weeks to really open my eyes up to that.
I'm going to miss some of my favorite communities, like r/cfb, r/baseball, and r/braves. Even before the API armageddon I was toying with leaving. It only made things clearer that Reddit is user hostile and will most likely only continue to get more so. I imagine the writing is on the wall for the old UI, which is the only way I could stand to use Reddit on the desktop.
I am considering it.
But I will have to wait until everything is accessible again, because I used it as a glorified bookmark storage. There is info I need to grab.
I'll delete mine at the end of June if nothing happens. I'll miss communities like r/baseball, r/torontobluejays, some anime/manga subreddits, and my university.
I'm focusing my attention on Tildes, Squabbles, kbin, and other ones though
If anyone can help me find the app that deleted your comments and can replace them, I would appreciate it. I saw it mentioned on Reddit but I am boycotting and can’t go look it up.
Preamble: from what I understand this is only possible if the subs you’re subscribed to have not gone dark. I may be wrong in this understanding, and there may be other options where this constraint is not a factor.
Here’s what I did. There may be easier and more efficient ways to do it, but this worked for me:
PS. In my instance it took a good number of repetitions of the Nuke Reddit History to get rid of all my comments and history.
I did mine on Sunday before the Darkness and it worked like a charm.
Good luck @mews
Cool thanks I’ll try it.
I grabbed ‘shreddit’ today - it’s a rust app installable via cargo. It overwrites every post with Lorem Ipsum text then deletes them. Run it like ‘while true; shreddit;done’ and it will churn through all of your posts and comments.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I deleted my posts but won't delete my account as there are still few niche subs I participate, but I am glad people are moving to other alternatives.