Do the advantages of deleting one’s entire Reddit history outweigh the disadvantages?
I have previously nuked my first Reddit account because it felt satisfactory to be completely detached from a platform one considers unethical/bad. Though, I have garnered quite some history on a second account—because Duty Calls*, of course—and I’m considering doing the same.
However, I don’t want to do it impulsively. I think I might be blind to some disadvantages. What do you think?
*
I think it’s generally pointless, spiteful, and only harms ordinary users who might someday have found value in coming across your old posts on Reddit from a search. It doesn’t harm Reddit itself, the “value” of your individual account is very small compared to their vast archive. And they still have it, deletion just removes it from the public-facing front end. If the reason you’re deleting it is because you don’t want AI to be trained on it, that ship has long ago sailed. There are downloadable archives of Reddit floating around that it will never be deleted from.
So I wouldn’t bother.
Reddit admins have already put things in place to counter editing or deleting comments.
I deleted an account from 2011 yet when I searched on Google for “site:reddit.com account name”, it listed loads of posts with their previous content (I used the script that changed all the contents before deleting).
All SM sites have been doing this for a while: they’ll shadow delete your account but will retain all the data.
And if they really want to they could restore the comments/posts with randomly generated user names.