Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
As a developer, this hits deep. RIP quality answers & search results for c# (in my case) related quedtions
The thing is - when I gave good answers, I mostly wrote them in Obsidian - so that I have Marktext files with my most interesting answers anyway.
So they haven't gone, they just don't exist inside Reddit any more. Anyone with the same questions could still get them - if there were an equivalent alternative to whatever subreddit exists.
In the case of Linux answers, however, I don't give a toss - because one of the worst things about Reddit is that the best repository of information for any distribution should be the official forum for that distribution... and interestingly, I suffered zero pain using my official forum, whilst Reddit mods seem to enjoy kicking you out for a day or three for telling someone to format queries in a useful way.
Don’t worry, chatGPT and other AIs have already trained off of reddit and probably hold that information
Hopefully Lemmy starts to fill that hole in as more people join and more questions asked then answered.
AI is your friend! I already use a mix of Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT for the really difficult problems. I just do tier 2 support, though.