I installed the official Reddit app and went on it to see what the old place was looking like now. My inbox was filled with spam. The "home feed" shows subs I never subscribed to. There are so many ads. Between the ads and the the extra subs in the feed, it's hard to just scroll. I also noted a lot of spam in some of the subs. Maybe they are subs with no mods? I'm not sure what's up with that.
That kind of built up history is exactly what keeps Reddit relevant though. It’s been the go-to place for so long that it stays just because it is where all the content is. And now with LLM’s any content you leave is going to get turned into a chatGPT bot to generate fake engagement for their ad numbers.
To be fair, LLMs are still going to be able to scrape your content, and I’d say even more so since individual instance owners do not have big lawyer teams and dedicated server maintaining teams like in Reddit to protect their content from being scraped. My personal take is to just keep commenting and posting on the Fediverse and make this a better place over time, and just use adblockers whenever you need Reddit to find information.
The built up history gives Reddit momentum, but it’s not like when you Google a solution to some tech issue and find a Reddit post from 2017 that solves it, that’s materially contributing to Spez’s IPO-chasing metrics. No, that’s all about engagement, and active current users.
When you delete your history, you’re just reducing the total information available to random people who are looking for it. It may feel good lighting it on fire but that’s about it.
If we stop using it, it’s just a historical record. Stopping using it is enough.
Ar least archive it, so archive org gets the engegemant instead of reddit.com