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.
It was all outdated. That’s why I got some many private messages from people wanting updates. Copying it all over would have been copying over inaccurate data from years ago.
I don't think reddit or any social media company gains copyright or ownership of what you post
There's no guarantee that what's being posted even belongs to or is the original creation of the poster.
I'm not sure where Reddit has landed on this, but I know some social media platforms explicitly reject ownership of certain types of content... Because if they insist they own it, they become responsible for it at a higher threshold.
If I start posting a bunch of hate speech in a niche, poorly moderated subreddit... Suddenly Reddit would be on the hook for that.
I know the laws in the USA aren't super tight on that kinda thing but in Europe you can hit some pretty rough consequences pretty quickly.
The stack exchange network does claim ownership. Their whole business model is to have a site where users post technical answers to questions, then sue business where an employee copy pasted code blurbs from one of their sites.
I avoid those sites when searching for technical answers for code I'm writing, though I'll sometimes use them for more meta questions (like how to get some tool to do some specific thing).
But it is interesting in that someone could post a code blurb that they didn't own in the first place and now stack exchange will go forward acting as if they do own it. I wonder if that will eventually be their downfall because it seems like a situation that could even be baited deliberately. Hell, they could even already have fraudulent cases tried and/or settled.