I get no longer posting, but why delete though? This was a site that you poured hundreds of hours into, and your knowledge in niche topics could help someone (hell even your forgetful future self) in a desperate web search.
I can’t speak for op but one reason I’ve seen mentioned is users don’t want reddit to keep historic data. Reddit will profit from that data by selling it, using it as corpus for training etc.
They might, but you will still be helping people, and if at a later date a court mandates that the authors of the training data be compensated for their actions, or if the corpus is released into open source repositories – then I’d still call that a win for humanity.
Personally in an ideal world, I would like to export all of my data from reddit before leaving, and then if later someone wants to host all of the dataset under a permissive open source license like I believe stackoverflow or wikipedia do, which is accessible to search engines, then scrub+anonymize my dataset and upload it there.
Obviously the issues with something like this are people uploading doctored data to poison the training models etc.
Unless something changed, deleting your account shouldn’t delete the content you created so it shouldn’t make much difference in that regard. There have been scripts that went through your history and would change / delete every comment though.
I get no longer posting, but why delete though? This was a site that you poured hundreds of hours into, and your knowledge in niche topics could help someone (hell even your forgetful future self) in a desperate web search.
I can’t speak for op but one reason I’ve seen mentioned is users don’t want reddit to keep historic data. Reddit will profit from that data by selling it, using it as corpus for training etc.
They might, but you will still be helping people, and if at a later date a court mandates that the authors of the training data be compensated for their actions, or if the corpus is released into open source repositories – then I’d still call that a win for humanity.
That is a fair point.
Personally in an ideal world, I would like to export all of my data from reddit before leaving, and then if later someone wants to host all of the dataset under a permissive open source license like I believe stackoverflow or wikipedia do, which is accessible to search engines, then scrub+anonymize my dataset and upload it there.
Obviously the issues with something like this are people uploading doctored data to poison the training models etc.
I don’t really have any niche knowledge; I’m basically an idiot. You make a very fair point. It just doesn’t apply to me.
Unless something changed, deleting your account shouldn’t delete the content you created so it shouldn’t make much difference in that regard. There have been scripts that went through your history and would change / delete every comment though.