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Comment by Klonoar

14 hours ago

Reddit has almost 20 years of comments.

You could certainly argue that it's less true now that there's legitimate people commenting, but there are years old threads on there with very helpful and valuable information that you can only really find via some incantations of Google search.

16 comments

Klonoar

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account42  14 hours ago

Have you ever looked at an old reddit comment thread.

  + Hey how do you do thing?
  |
  -+ [deleted]
   |
   -+ Thanks, that's just what I needed.

  • mothballed  13 hours ago

    Reddit will delete anything remotely controversial if it contains referenced facts. They banned and deleted my account for simply stating the 5th amendment prohibits requiring incriminating yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy League educated lawyer dug up the comment one year after I posted it, told reddit I was distributing illegal legal advice, and had my whole account nuked.

    • stevenwoo  4 hours ago

      I got suspended for criticizing the state of Israel’s treatment of civilians in occupied territories, but they didn’t delete my account, though I stopped logging in after a week. (Logging in retains your subscriptions). I've seen plenty of similar comments to mine so I assume it was the work of some oddball who I responded to that has an connection to somebody who works there so they could pull some strings to suspend my account.

    • markdown  3 hours ago

      Nah, it's rare to see [deleted].

      More common is seeing "tumble cup and he ran flew tree" due to users using anonymizing apps to remove their old data.

VCFundedGenYer  10 hours ago

Reddit HAD almost 20 years of comments, until about three years ago when they started to lock down APIs, remove moderators, and make poor choices. Users reacted accordingly and now you will just see a whole lot of [deleted] or comment content replaced with garbage data. It's no longer an archive or wealth of information it once was.

  • Klonoar  8 hours ago

    That redacted amount is absolutely miniscule and blown out of proportion.

    • tumult  3 hours ago

      Not in my experience. I see it almost every time I end up in a reddit thread from search results. I've recently started demoting it in Kagi. It's just not as good as it used to be. Newer threads tend to be full of junk and bots.

    • ikr678  1 hour ago

      I see it quite often in reddit threads that appear in my google search results for obscure technical/hardware issues.

      The original helpful comments were probably provided by switched-on users of whatever subreddit, and those same users are the ones most likely to nuke/overwrite their comment history when they leave the site.

davkan  2 hours ago

The rest of the internet is so enshittified by SEO garbage that searching for a problem you’re having and appending reddit is the only way to get a quick answer without scrolling for 5 pages down an article.