1y ago

I deleted all my post from my reddit account, can they still monetize them?

Deleting a post is simply marking a piece of text so nobody sees it, but I think the text is still stored in their servers.

Furthermore, a large company like reddit, must backup regularly, meaning there must be several copies of my posts in several SSDs. If the backup once a day… some of my posts are 5 years old.

Companies exist to make money. I suspect they just marked my posts not to be readable by anyone, except staff and they can still monetize them.

Am I wearing a tinfoil hat way too often?

43 comments

I think it’s enough to stop engaging with Reddit, there’s not much point in worrying about what you’ve already posted there imo.
- Personally it brings me joy to see that you're falling on empty posts from top google searches, and hope you find many more in the future. You're just saying that you prefer to give money to Reddit if it's convenient for you.
  That's the entire point of leaving reddit with our 10+ years of contribution; leaving reddit wasn't convenient for me, I'm not gonna help it be convenient for you. Get rekt spez.
  
  SearXNG is free. Don't waste your time with Kagi.
  
  now that Google's search engine has gone down in a bullshit flaming AI crapshoot
  Tried Kagi yet?
  
  Users deleted comments was the only power we really had. How is reddit worth anything when all the people who shared information now lead to deleted comments?
  I deleted a lot of my guides because of reddit. I still have them, but they're no longer online due. Reddit is even kind enough to say that my account which I deleted no longer exists, maybe because it was banned. So that's nice, all of us who deleted it in protest have been labeled as banned users.
  I've had to use search "reddit" a couple times for various niche things but I stopped after multiple "answers" were just directing to deleted comments.
  
  Except most of Reddit of bots now too lol
- You're saying there is no point, and the comment below agrees with you, because the only point is that it removes threads and that's getting old.
  No it's not getting old, that's the entire point of deleting posts. Reddit should not get post traffic through google for something I did, and I can take that away. Me alone won't have a big impact, but if we all do it Reddit will have more struggles.
  In order of efficacy:
  Don't post to Reddit: this is what reddit needs to keep going. Reddit doesn't produce anything.
  If you have popular posts people come back to (like help communities) delete them, this still drives traffic and app downloads for reddit.
  Commenting/upvoting/downvoting on posts drives engagement. If you have to visit reddit, don't click on votes and don't comment.
  A reminder that reddit is still struggling to IPO and sell off, in large part due to the.exodus.
  
  Dude I'm not interested in going scorched earth on one of the most useful repositories of practical information and discussion, and I'm disturbed that you're so zealous to do so.

This post is pure gold. If your other posts are as heavy as this one Reddit is sitting on a small fortune.
- Dude barged in Lemmy 2 months ago, made 40+ posts with average of 20 comments. I'd consider that performance, translated to Reddit size over 5 years, to earn quite the lower percentile among the posters. So yeah, Reddit is probably sitting on a small fortune thanks to this generous person.

They monetize your posts by serving ads next to them. If no one can see the content, it's not monetized. The other thing is using them to train language models and such. That's a little more abstract, and hard to account for.
Also, not sure if this is still a good way to do things, but there are tools to overwrite all your comments with useless text before deleting it. The thinking is that reddit and any third party websites aren't going to bother storing multiple versions of a deleted comment.
- [deleted]
- Even if they do, they wouldn't know which ones to restore.
  OP maybe your data is still there, but it's not visible to anyone but reddit, which is the important part imo

Did you delete them outright or modify the text and then delete it? That is the tinfoil hat way! If you lived in Europe you could request your data to be deleted. You can also request your data and they are supposed to comply at some point. If you did that you could see what they have.
The rabbit hole will drive you a little bonkers so maybe don't overthink it for now and take a look at https://www.reveddit.com/ and archive.org to see if your username pops up.
- Just an FYI but if you posted anything prior to March 2023, the Pushshift project archived it. Even if you requested Reddit itself to remove all of your data, everything will exist in that archive forever.
  
  Seems like a GDPR nightmare waiting to happen for them

PowerDeleteSuite was a good tool for overwriting your comments and deleting them. Now you need a rate-limited fork of it. It still works, but I don't have the link handy.
Edit all of your comments and posts to some useless text, then delete them.
- [deleted]
- Overwriting or editing a post will almost certainly just create a new revision of it in their database. All these tools work on the basis that doesn't happen, but that deletion is a flag rather than a drop, which is pretty inconsistent. The reality in every large cms/forum software I've used is that revisions are the norm.
  Reddit have the ability to keep all revisions of all posts made on their servers - they may even be legally required to do so. If a police agency requires evidence relation to a post on reddit linked to terrorism, they're not going to be pleased if it is so easily eradicated. Some people think that GDPR gives them the absolute right for their data to be removed - but not if it conflicts with other laws and legal requirements, and even sometimes commercial interests (See "legitimate interest")
  Bottom line is - if you don't want something to potentially exist forever, don't post it on the internet and pass control of it to others.

I'm not sure about what the backup schedule and stuff has to do with it, but I don't think it helps much:
deleted posts don't come up in Google searches after a while
deleted comments might be counted in the comment count on a post someone navigates to (not sure), so at most the post will initially appear to have more content which might get someone to click
Marginal change at best, it's probably not worth your time thinking about it

“In several SSDs”
Backups are usually done to slower HDDs (online backups) and then to tape archives (offline).
They’ve got it forever.

Hey, can you share a tutorial on how to do this, and some of your review
I always forget to do that

Can they? Yes. Will they? No. Would it be worth the backlash? Also no.

You gave them an irrevocable license to basically use your content in any way they see fit. Them not showing posts you deleted is just them being nice, not being obligated to do so. They could simply ignore your request or restore posts later.
You should have thought about that when you gave them that license to your content.
- Almost. According to EU law, identifiable information including usernames need to be redacted.
  They can restore it but it needs to be without your account information attached
- Posts tend to die within a day. What would be the point, reddit posts aren't worth restoring.

Would have been better to run the script that edits posts, just to fuck with the data.
China and Facebook would probably buy it for their own profile databases on every person on the planet.
Chances of that though are unlikely. Both are more worried about short term things. For China spotting dissent and trends on the fly. For Facebook selling ads more accurately.

In short, No. If they do so, sue them.
But the reality is much more complex than that. IANAL, but I do believe that they should likely avoid trying to monetize your data.
That doesn't stop people who buy reddit from attempting it, but as I said before...if they do so egregiously, sue them.
In an ideal world your data should not be monetized. They might have backups but your data should eventually get phased out of those backups over time. It's impractical for them to keep data forever, and old data is much less valuable.
- I don't think so.
  The postings of a specific individual are not important for great companies. Its the mass. They search for patterns and want to use this patterns for advertisment or to lead your use of the internet. The postings or information of one single individuum may be not even necessary after the analyis. And even if they could use them for some purpose, after 5 years or so, they arn't current anymore. In this time, there will be 1000s of users who spend their data.

Companies exist to make money.
Therfor, it isn't a great problem, tbh.
The gouverment my spyy on us just to have as much information as possible to get profiles but companies need you as possible customer. If you never use the side againt, they would not find any use of the data and to store it makes costs. So, they probable delete them after a certain time.

Reddit is not going to look up your post amongst billions of others. Privacy nutjobs are so paranoid I swear.
- It's not wrong to be concerned. Unfortunately it's all too common for privacy newcomers to decide their threat model is bigger than it really is.

43 comments