Interesting. If it's alright to ask, why do you have this policy? In my case I never delete my posts/comments and always edit with a big "EDIT" disclosure.
I do the same. In my case, it's doxxing prevention. I don't like that someone can put my profile on one of the reddit inspector sites and get a detailed profile of me, including my age, where I live and my hobbies. I also don't like it when people can click on my name and get my entire history across all subreddits.
That's not the case here because I consider HN to be the equivalent of a single Subreddit, so the information is less diverse. I don't talk about every facet of my life here.
On the other hand, I'm the kind of person who uses a different username on every forum. It's a habit I picked up in the early days of the internet.
This is especially useful in this era where even news organization websites will quote your online username to add to their stories.
The trouble with throw away accounts is that there is technology to link the accounts by comparing your writing style to other accounts. Hacker news had a good demonstration of that awhile back.
Some might call me paranoid, but I also change my writing style between sensitive accounts.
Not all, because that would be a bother, but between accounts where I'm a moderator and those where I'm a normal user, I make sure to change my mindset.
On some accounts, I translate everything I write twice for greater anonymity.
I see that implementation now says "Site is closed as of 2023-03-01". Do we know of any alternatives? Ideally I'd like to see if my HN handle brings up my reddit handle, or other cross-site linkages.
Lots of subreddits have minimum account age and/or karma requirements due to how bad the bot situation has gotten, so unless you're willing to farm karma and wait a month to post each time (or maintain multiple semi-permanent "burner" accounts, which, as pointed out by Maximus9000, can still be linked together by writing style), it's easier to just purge your comment history on a regular basis.
my reddit account was deleted years ago, and I wasn't that strict. But the big thing that lead to me deleting and creating new accounts was basically mass taggers.
Long long story short, I probably made some comment on some apparently "bad" forum years ago (let's say, 2012). And hell, I was dwnvoted vehemently and was arguing a storm against it. But because those mass taggers just care about where you post, and not what you post, I was labeled as a bigot. No big deal. Years later (maybe 2015) I deleted most of my older comments anyway as some transition phase as I left college.
Then in 2018 or so some person called me that specific bigoted phrase. Remember, this would be 3 years ago, and I commented heavily. No way any human on a video game subreddit cared enough about me to dig through 3 years of comment history (which by then would be mostly video games and anime) to find comments they disagreed with. Especially when those comments don't exist on my profile. I was clearly mass tagged and someone wanted an easy insult.
So I just threw that all away. grabbed the saved posts I cared about, deleted some 6 year old account and restarted in a new handle. I didn't want to bother with any future drama that was already well behind me. Because reddit doesn't care if my account is 6 days old or 6 years old; there's no difference. Why bother trying to redeem some crude handle I made up on the spot in the beginning of college?
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TLDR there are very annoying redditors who will troll histories and tag you without context and I was tired of dealing with that.
Exactly. And it's so sad when I find a thread that clearly had exactly the answer I was looking for to a question, with somebody replying "thanks so much that answers it perfectly!" only the answer itself was deleted. :(
A couple years ago I came across a deleted Reddit comment[1] and I wished that I could read it so badly I messaged the op and asked him what he said. He didn't remember, and I was hoping so badly it would've been restored after I read this news. Alas, it wasn't.
I believe KitchenAid stand mixers [assembled in America](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0qKp-0h9P18), and the parts (edit: excepting the motor) do not appear to be sourced from China.\n\nHave a look around your local Ikea; a lot of their stuff, especially kitchen tools, are from Europe, Taiwan, etc, and not China. They label the source of all their stuff, so you can avoid stuff from China.\n\nZojirushi is a Japanese brand that makes all manner of appliances. Good quality. Work well. Hold up over time. Top-quality engineering.\n\nBlendtec blenders are also assembled in America. Their website casually avoid mentioning where parts are sourced, but they're at least an American firm.\n\nJapan also makes some pretty good knives, if you're in the market for those.\n\nFinally, there is always eBay. And for some appliances, such as toasters, you may in fact be able to get a better product than is available on shelves now.
This is why I quite like that Reddit by default just orphans comments on account deletion. One comment is usually not much of a PII danger, it's correlating them that builds up a picture. So this lets people leave their comments for others while reducing dox risk (well, unless the attacker uses Pushshift, in which case this is all futile)
If I wrote something especially noteworthy, I'll likely remember in my mind forevermore. If memory loss does occur someday, oh well. Am I going to remember to care?
The rest served its purpose at the time, but isn't something I will ever want to look back on again. What do you find so interesting in your old work?
It's not my old work I want to read, it's that of others. Comments are a frequently valuable shared annotation system for discussion on a post. Frequently I will search reddit for answers to questions I have and find a useful result in a comment.
Other times I want to get a summary of a new topic so I will find an applicable subreddit and sort by top from the last year to get an idea of what is interesting for this community.
Wherein lies the value of seeing that others read your work?
As the saying goes, work is done for those who pay for it. When I, like you, write comments on sites like these I am the one paying for it. I derive entertainment value for the cost I am sinking, so I find it to be an acceptable trade, but beyond that small window the entertainment is over and the value of what was produced is gone. To keep it around beyond that is just hoarding data.
I can appreciate that one might find value in feeling like they are helping out a greater community by allowing others to read their work. I commend those who see that value. But even that seems fleeting. If your work disappeared without you noticing, the value derived from that would not be lost. It is not the perpetual existence of the data that provides that value.
Although, I think the greater question here is: What value is there in allowing a for-profit company like Reddit to get rich selling the work you paid for?
I've had some interesting discussions replying to 10+ year old comments I find in Google ever since Reddit allowed subs to opt in to replies to older threads.
random reddit posts have saved my butt several times in "oh god oh god I broke the data lake" or similar situations.
Some rando post from 2 years ago, too. Deleting them after 24 hours just kinda takes away the value prop for reddit. If I want a real-ish-time convo with someone then i'll get on Discord; the value of reddit is the posts live on.
A couple years ago I came across a deleted Reddit comment[1] and I wished that I could read it so badly I messaged the op and asked him what he said. He didn't remember, and I was hoping so badly it would've been restored after I read this news. Alas, it wasn't.
That's not the case here because I consider HN to be the equivalent of a single Subreddit, so the information is less diverse. I don't talk about every facet of my life here.
On the other hand, I'm the kind of person who uses a different username on every forum. It's a habit I picked up in the early days of the internet.
This is especially useful in this era where even news organization websites will quote your online username to add to their stories.