That was me. I know there are a lot of comments and replies to comments here so it's easy to lose track of who did what to who.
I think if you read my replies in this thread you can begin to understand why it is not trolling or juvenile behavior, it's just me exercising control over the content that I posted, on my own time, following all the rules that reddit established when they launched.
This is a feature. Like I mentioned, all the content that I have ever posted is likely to be indexed in someone's archive somewhere whether reddit controls that archive or not. There are too many players in that space and they have been active for years with publicly available tools to manage all the grunt work for anyone who wanted to download it all and slog through it looking for gems.
If they find one of my edited posts that has a suspicious amount of worthless updoot karma and that post is totally out of context then I am sure they are bright enough to figure out that they will need to get that content somewhere else.
I left untouched all of my old "Best of Reddit" and the gilded posts since those had above average value to the readers who chose to engage and updoot.
At the end of the day, the content has always been mine to edit or delete. That is the way that the site was designed to function so labeling anything I do as vandalism, trolling, or juvenile behavior only works to make you look like someone trying hard to understand how to value your investment in reddit in the event that others choose to act similarly.
As I mentioned somewhere else, reddit could change all of this if they instituted controls that would allow live users to instantly recognize bots and adverts so that users can instantly choose to read a post or comment or to ignore it. The fact that they embraced and actively ignore the bot armies, the shills for various products or philosophies, the blatant adverts, etc tells me and others that they have lost touch with their users.
As it is, forcing me to check karma levels and username age to hope to recognize reposters and bots is just wrong. Clear and ban the bots, ID the adverts, add a shill warning to those who evangelize or push agendas or misinformation, and the traffic finds a floor.
On that floor reddit will find those loyal, long-term users like myself a lot more likely to engage. Clean the house and make it more livable and others will move in to see what's up. Sunshine is the best disinfectant here. Otherwise people like myself will choose whether to continue to engage with reddit and set their own terms of engagement.
Reddit is very much a real-time experience. People visit to read or view current posts or to comment on current posts. I suspect that dead posts, especially those more than a few months, are functionally never touched again. Broken search has always been a feature so the idea that anything on an old thread is useful is dubious at best. Even searching Google for specific information from reddit posts will not pull up what you want if that information is deep in a comment thread.
There's really nothing to see here. This is standard expected behavior baked into reddit from day one. Not even /u/spez or /u/kn0thing wanted everything they ever posted to be perpetually available. They had multiple discussions early on about how some of it might appear years down the line.
I'm not making reddit worse for anyone. I'm the guy who saw the "no shoes, no shirt, no service" sign and made sure I wore my best t-shirt and a pair of boots so I could enjoy the facilities.
The only ones who might get their feelings hurt are those who are actively using reddit content to train their LLMs or those who decided to invest in reddit's IPO and who see any modification of posts as potentially damaging the value of the content.
In the end, it has always been my content and their aggregator. The shear volume of traffic they have seen makes anything that I do functionally irrelevant.
I'm late to the discussion here, but I use shreddit. It edits and deletes all my past comments.
However I found recently there are websites that have every single one of my old comments accessible and I'm sure reddit itself does to. Once you comment it's there forever.
This is also my experience. Editing or deleting comments on reddit doesn't permanently remove them since there are so many operators updating their own reddit streams in real time. It never goes away, it just takes a little more effort to find the original.
That was me. I know there are a lot of comments and replies to comments here so it's easy to lose track of who did what to who.
I think if you read my replies in this thread you can begin to understand why it is not trolling or juvenile behavior, it's just me exercising control over the content that I posted, on my own time, following all the rules that reddit established when they launched.
This is a feature. Like I mentioned, all the content that I have ever posted is likely to be indexed in someone's archive somewhere whether reddit controls that archive or not. There are too many players in that space and they have been active for years with publicly available tools to manage all the grunt work for anyone who wanted to download it all and slog through it looking for gems.
If they find one of my edited posts that has a suspicious amount of worthless updoot karma and that post is totally out of context then I am sure they are bright enough to figure out that they will need to get that content somewhere else.
I left untouched all of my old "Best of Reddit" and the gilded posts since those had above average value to the readers who chose to engage and updoot.
At the end of the day, the content has always been mine to edit or delete. That is the way that the site was designed to function so labeling anything I do as vandalism, trolling, or juvenile behavior only works to make you look like someone trying hard to understand how to value your investment in reddit in the event that others choose to act similarly.
As I mentioned somewhere else, reddit could change all of this if they instituted controls that would allow live users to instantly recognize bots and adverts so that users can instantly choose to read a post or comment or to ignore it. The fact that they embraced and actively ignore the bot armies, the shills for various products or philosophies, the blatant adverts, etc tells me and others that they have lost touch with their users.
As it is, forcing me to check karma levels and username age to hope to recognize reposters and bots is just wrong. Clear and ban the bots, ID the adverts, add a shill warning to those who evangelize or push agendas or misinformation, and the traffic finds a floor.
On that floor reddit will find those loyal, long-term users like myself a lot more likely to engage. Clean the house and make it more livable and others will move in to see what's up. Sunshine is the best disinfectant here. Otherwise people like myself will choose whether to continue to engage with reddit and set their own terms of engagement.