[ouEight12]

Except part of their 'value prop' is "We have this giant trove of human created content, and AI companies need to start paying us to utilize it when training their models".

[commandlinefan]

Well, if that's the case, they can easily switch to "show 'deleted' content" - removing your comments doesn't delete them from Reddit's DB.

[mynameisvlad]

To add to the other comments, they have confirmed in the past they don’t keep track of history.

That could have changed, sure, but nothing indicates that is the case.

You could also go the GDPR route and request all your data be deleted, if you are subject to that. They would be forced to comply with that request.

[yawnr]

"When it became known that post edits were not saved but post deletions were saved, code was added to edit your post prior to deletion."

[AlecSchueler]

Most deletion apps I've seen also offer the ability to redact your comments with nonsense edits before deletion.

[antisthenes]

There are public data dumps of Reddit comments available all the way up to December 2022. And they're only roughly ~2TB all together.

There's nothing stopping AI companies from just using those instead of paying Reddit $50 million to scrape all of them using the API. It would also be 10x-100x quicker to do that rather than hammer their API for the comments (the API sucks for mass data retrieval)

[mynameisvlad]

Sure, but companies doing that also wouldn’t be paying Reddit for that data.

The point of shredding comments isn’t to hurt the companies scraping the data (although that might be a nice side effect). Ultimately it’s to hurt Reddit.

[realce]

Where would someone find these?

[monitron]

Ah, good point. If this is the case, yeah, shred away. Still it's too bad that this greed will make it harder for humans to see useful old discussions.

[coldpie]

It's not greed, it's capitalism. This is the system working as it's intended.

[SilverBirch]

Do you think that reddit actually deletes comments when the user presses delete? My assumption would be that it just sticks up a "do not display" flag in the database. I'm sure that there's some influence that GDPR has though.

[prepend]

The plug in I use (I think nuke Reddit) overwrites comments with random blarg that’s realistic sounding text, then deletes them.

I’m sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.

I think if they got a specific subpoena for me, they could find my comments with a manual investigation, but I expect that will never happen as there’s no reason for anyone to do that.

I just want to remove my content from Reddit.com and make it harder if they decide to undelete or otherwise not respect my decision.

I’m surprised Reddit still allows edit and undelete and expect them to remove the functionality soon.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

This is probably true, but at least one implication of what the program in the title does is edit your existing comments with something before marking them as deleted, because at some point (this is probably no longer true) Reddit did not store your entire comment history.

There are obviously ways to defeat this in analysis, but it does make Reddit's job slightly harder if they want to leverage that data. It would also probably be interesting to also just edit them and not delete them in some cases in some randomized way, which would make it even harder to reliably tease out good comments from noise.

[fmdragon]

Some time last year I attempted to make a similar tool. I was able to retrieve comments that had been deleted in the requests so I suspect that there is a "display flag" of sorts that is checked against.

[unsupp0rted]

Most of these tools first edit+save the comment with a word or single letter overwriting the original text in the db, then delete it.

[dimitrios1]

CCPA also has a right to delete clause

[ed312]

GDPR only applies to EU citizens though. If the data is truly valuable, I could imagine some work-arounds as well. E.g. maybe each reddit post is automatically a copyright work which you immediate give a perpetual license to reddit inc. You also automatically transfer copyright ownership to reddit inc and they license back your ability to share your comment.

[dontupvoteme]

"pay us enough and we'll provide the real upvote numbers and not the fake ones" as well

[amne]

perhaps it would be "fun" to replace the comment with a GPT summary .. in 10 words or less

[willcipriano]

Where the adversarial AI people at? Write comments that if fed into a model generate nonsense or falsehoods.