Archive your Reddit data before it's too late | Hacker News Reader

Archive your Reddit data before it's too late

xavd.id

459 pointsxavdid382 comments

Personally, I wiped all of my personal Reddit accounts last year. I now use short-lived anonymous accounts which I also wipe after awhile. I use Shreddit [^0] to wipe the account before deleting it. I do wish that I was able to backup some valuable conversations, but I honestly wouldn't find much worth in the backups without the additional context. So perhaps something to explore -- also storing the context of a particular comment with a configurable depth.

[^0]: https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

How on earth are you able to live without your reddit karma? I mean, I don't own a house or have a family, but at least I have 475 reddit points.

It is impossible to interact in some subreddits if you dont have xyz karma or have a # weeks old account

I do find that there is no better indicator about the quality of a sub-reddit, than that class of requirements.

The more karma/age/posts they require, the more likely the place is a cesspool of some sort.

I've found a very light set of restrictions - possibly even only on select posts - is tremendously helpful for content quality. But anything beyond a light set quickly throws the whole community off kilter and into a self-congratulatory echo chamber.

A lot of subreddits - especially smaller ones - would be instantly overrun by spambots without these requirements.

Its not too bad, it is a pretty good way of excluding no karma bot accounts.

You don't interact. Let them die slowly.

Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.

What's the point to get your "2c" heard in Reddit? Redditors are the minorities.

Reddit is a really, really, really good system for connecting people who have a niche interest. You can still do forums and so forth for those things, but discoverability isn't nearly as good. It's been co-opted by venture capital and is becoming less so, but right now it's a great community unmatched elsewhere on the internet in it's scale and quality.

I mean, I hear you if you're posting your opinion as comment 18,753 on an r/news post about the former president. But I've had some genuinely helpful interactions on smaller subreddits - things like getting guidance on how to repair old Nintendo Game and Watch hardware. It's not about getting one's opinion heard, it's about giving and getting help among folks who share the same hobby.

I don't have any affection for Reddit itself, but there are a couple of subreddits where I guess the small but critical mass of folks for a hobby somehow ended up there, and I hope they land somewhere else as Reddit commits suicide.

Curious why you are contributing here?

Arguably, Hacker News is a lot of an echo chamber too.

What’s the point to get your “2c” heard on Hacker News? Hacker News users are even more of a minority than Redditors.

I'm going to miss the computer hardware sell/trade subreddits, they're one of the most active I've found and saves 20-40% over eBay or similar. All require a minimum account age and karma to reduce the risk of scammers.

> Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.

Everywhere can be an echo chamber, even here.

Reddit is nice for the small subs/communities where you can talk about something niche so you don't have to go register in some archaic phpbb forum that might go away.

The bigger the sub, the more likely it will echo. Much like the bigger the story here the same effect will happen. I think that's just humanity. It is very easy to identify and move on/not follow those subs.

IMO reddit/HN feel similar as communities if you clearly steer away from the most popular subreddits

There are legitimate use cases for reddit interactions. Some of the smaller communities in particular, discussing specific games or health conditions for example, actually are excellent. Most are not that good, however.

The key question here is: "So what?"

And that is not a snide, snarky question - it is a sincere inquiry. Why is interacting in subreddits with karma gates important to your life?

Some of the serious technical discussion subreddits I use for technical discussions won’t allow anyone with new accounts or a low amount of karma to participate.

If you’re trying to have a technical discussion, you’d be locked out.

You don't interact. Let them die slowly.

It is the normal lifecycle that platforms die. Look at MySpace.

for most sites like that... i probably don't want to be there anyway.

except HN of course

Good news: Your karma stays around even after you delete all your posts/comments!

Bad news: it depends on how you delete your comments. If you just delete your comments via the delete button, Reddit will still archive your last 1000 comments and posts. Not sure how shreddit and other similar apps work, but I think you need to update and replace your old posts with something blank like a space before you delete them. My knowledge might be out of date, so feel free to point out that I’m wrong.

I have ~100k on reddit, but somehow hacker news managed to make my ~500 points feel far more valuable.

I hate to break it to you but neither is particularly valuable.

likewise. I have over half a million on reddit but all I did was crosspost links and make funny comments that probably wouldn't land on HN

Every time someone down-votes me here, they kill my future, bit by bit.

HN Karma obviously!

What's the point of HN Karma honestly ?

I trade mine in for its current dollar value by messaging pg and he wires over the cash.

Some HN features are gated on karma.

Endorphins when you see it going up.

I would absolutely trade in public displays of karma for having a random username assigned to every one of my posts with my history being obscured while still keeping track of "karma" for moderation / feature gating.

The same point everywhere - to drive discussion to popular posts and away from unpopular posts, and to encourage conformity to board culture through operant conditioning and gamification. If you give people a number and tell them that number is special, they'll do whatever they can to make that number go up, and to avoid whatever makes it go down.

At least in theory. In practice it's utterly useless because it's based on incorrect (or possibly outdated) assumptions about the nature and goals of HN's userbase (which I've decided to call the "good hacker" fallacy.)

Once you have more than 500, you unlock downvotes! Worth it for that alone.

Not sure if you mean keeping track of total upvotes or just the voting system in general. In either case, just for a start, I think discussions are easier to have & follow along with when someone can just upvote a comment to engage in the discussion vs posting something like "+1" or "^ this" or "I agree", and the number is the same feedback in lieu of meaningless posts. Voting also helps with ordering (as opposed to time based ordering), whether your total karma is displayed or not.

Downvoting. But it's easy to karma whore up to 500.

To give you dreams like the done I had last night where I lost 6 points and decided to delete my comment so I wouldn’t lose any more.

Are you really asking what's the point of having... points?

They are points!

It empowers us to disappear distasteful opinions.

make the groupthink easier to track via API

That deep feeling of fulfillment.

That sweet ability to downvote.

Impressing the ladies!

Pfff, I’m collecting HN points for a rainy day; they’re worth at least 10 Reddit points each!

Hopefully one day we can redeem it for cash with all that API money they're making off the posts that generated it :)

There was a time when you could get bitcoin for your reddit karma... back when spending several bitcoin for a pizza was a thing.

Man, those are Hacker News numbers. About 300 times as many people have upvoted my drunken rants on Reddit.

475? Not 47.5k? I think you can easily have 7.5k per 3 months or so on Reddit. HN is way harder.

The average upvote count for comments here is 5, anecdotally. On reddit it can be in the dozens, even hundreds depending on subreddit. My abandoned reddit account I had for 2 years had 39k karma, and I wasn't obsessed.

I disagree, it's extremely easy on both. Like, sure, it is slower on HN but community is also smaller

That's like whole week of commenting!

I laughed.

Given that data collection companies would have long since archived your comments into their data stores, deleting all of your comments after a few years is likely only harming everyone else trying to read old threads through the website (rather than data collection archives).

It’s becoming increasingly frustrating to read old Reddit threads about technical issues where someone went back and deleted all of their posts. Trying to guess what was discussed by reading every other comment is a frustrating experience.

I get the frustration, but it still would to put pressure on them. Because even though the data might have been scraped/bought, it means that people would not go to reddit to find information, as it'd be deleted/worthless.

So yes, it's acknowledging that you can't take back the scraped data, but you can at least poison the well for others who would use it.

And yes, it would harm current users of reddit. That's kind of the point, because I don't think reddit makes any significant changes unless they get significant pushback from the thing they're trying to sell -- #s of users.

If it was a big problem for Reddit they'd probably make it impossible.

> It’s becoming increasingly frustrating to read old Reddit threads

Yeah, that's the point. Users are clawing back the value they gave to Reddit because they are angry with the decisions the company has made.

I think that's pretty close to a "if I can't have it no one can" attitude, and it's a net-negative for the world.

I'm happy to see it, but it's a little surprising (and even frustrating) that this ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back. Reddit has deserved this for a very, very long time for more serious abominations than trying to monetize the site.

Yup. What a mess!

Sure wish there was a better way to advance things.

I do the same on Reddit and similar sites (including HN), though I never delete any comments, just the accounts. I've become increasingly uneasy about leaving a digital trail, especially as there are increasingly advanced techniques to correlate accounts via stylometry.

For Reddit specifically, if I needed to, I would look up old comments in Pushshift if I could remember enough information to locate them - keywords, approximate date, subreddit, username. It's somewhat annoying that this service no longer exists. Though there are dumps, and backups of those dumps, so hopefully someone will release a similar search tool for these, eventually. Perhaps also including the data scraped by Archive Team. Maybe I'll have a crack at it myself as a side project.

HN doesn't allow you to delete comments anyway. You can try emailing dang and he'll give you some excuse about how he doesn't need to care about GDPR and data protection laws.

To be fair HN is purely a US entity; GDPR doesn't apply as much as the EU might insist it does.

YCombinator, the parent of HN, does business in the EU.

GDPR applies as long as your service is used by EU citizens[0].

[0]: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

I've been using this: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/

It runs client-side in the browser and has filter & export functionality if you want to retain anything.

I tried this but it found only a portion of my comments, and exported less than 200. Just be careful to check things before deleting

If you simply delete your account, the comments live on but are anonymized. The username is [deleted].

It's a lot easier than deleting all your comments before deleting the account, and as others have said, it preserves the conversation for future people.

I'd much rather learn what a bunch of deleted accounts thought about in a thread from 10 years ago than getting only a partial conversation.

It looks like Shreddit relies on the Reddit API to work. Is this tool going to break with the API changes? Or is personal API usage unaffected?

From what I've read, personal API keys (issued to anyone) will continue to work fine, but apps that expose a way to use arbitrary keys (like in a settings UI, rather than hard-coded at build time) will be deemed in violation of ToS, specifically so that personal keys can't easily be used by the masses as a workaround for apps that have a 1:many dev:user ratio.

If you can build an app (or clone what someone else has built) that contains your key, you can proceed. This is fairly high friction for mobile apps, like building/patching an .apk and side loading it.

I did the same, and reddit actually chain banned ("suspended" as they call it) the remainder of my accounts and started banning any account as I made it, until I made sure to wipe their tracking cookies & switch to a new IP.

I make sure to tether off my phone when doing weird ops on reddit, they can't seem to correlate the banks of mobile IPs with my accounts (yet).

Somewhat OT, but I think it's interesting that YC has specifically employed patterns on HN to prevent deleting the comments you've made.

I actually like that. It's quite often that I stumble upon an older Reddit thread when searching something specific and the (presumably) valuable comments are just [deleted]. True, people might want to erase some things they said, but it makes Reddit a lot less valuable as a search resource.

I agree. The fear mongering & sending yourself to /dev/null is out of hand. To me a particularly virulent new pattern that is super anti-social. I think most of ya'll are enduringly good humans & we're better as a world with your thoughts shared.

I'm torn about this. On one hand I love finding old comments with solutions to my problems, on the other hand it's easy enough to identify an author based on simple word statistics, so deleted your account isn't enough to prevent an old comment to come and bite you in the future.

This works, and I certainly respect your choice to do so, but if we ass start doing this it removes a huge amount of the value from the platform.

For example I just recently went searching for a solution to a problem, and found 3 reddit posts with what must've been solutions because there were "awesome, works great!" responses, but I'll never know what those solutions were because the user had deleted their posts.

I mean, we could all just use Signal with disappearing messages enabled I suppose, that would keep anyone from utilizing "our data"... I fear we'll just doom ourselves to asking the same questions over and over and over and over if we can't build lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge.

> over and over and over and over if we can't build lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge

The lesson here is that it is fundamentally impossible to build lasting repositories of knowledge on a proprietary platform owned by some entity.

The only solutions that can stand the test of time for the long haul are decentralized systems built on open standardized protocols which are not owned by anyone.

> if we [all] start doing this it removes a huge amount of the value from the platform.

I think that's the intent. If Reddit turns evil, users can choose to punish the platform for that.

True, and I'm all for punishing the platform. When we do so we're also punishing ourselves however. They're losing potential monetary value, we're the ones losing knowledge. (I'm assuming they have full backups and could trivially undo the deletions for purposes such as selling LLM training data, so the amount of harm we're doing them really is only limited to "engagement" numbers)

Much like the SO incident, it just makes me increasingly hesitant to contribute to any future platform where the only method of redress the users have is self-harm. Seem some good suggestions in this thread though, so maybe we can come up with something new.

Another option to nuke ..

Last night I wiped my old and well used account with Android App "Redact": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.redact.app

I have an account that's older than some current reddit users have lived, I've pretty much never deleted anything from it but I plan to replace all comments and threads I've created on that account with something like the following text: "Removed in protest of reddits idiotic 2023-06-30 API rule changes."

Shreddit looks like a good tool for this, just have to tweak it so it doesn't actually remove the data, just replace and leave it.

Would be fun to also build a tool for restoring the content should reddit reverse its idiotic API decision. But why bother doing that when they wont...

I ran this on my user about an hour ago, and all my messages are still on reddit and also libreddit frontends. I wonder if their api is ignoring the user-agent, or there is a very long cache time.

I also open short lived anonymous accounts. I just sign up using a temporary more or less anonymous mail address (lots of sites that offer this), input a bogus birth date to be able to see all posts, recreate my subscriptions and multireddits and I’m good to go for another 6 months.

All your comments are probably crawled anyhow. You can't delete anything from the internet.

Reddit has a lot of good info. This is to the credit of the people posting there. But I hate it when good helpful info or part of a conversation that was going to answer my problem becomes a deleted post because Im GoNnA dElEtE aLl My ReDdIt DaTa

So you end up with the value of what you paid. Got it!

Paid ecosystems wouldn't have open discourse at this scale

Do you destroy your comments that have replies though?

If you do, that's a fairly nasty and thoughtless thing to do and I would strongly encourage you to revise your approach to commenting and/or privacy.

Completely disagree. Not archiving/recording everything for eternity has be the de facto modus operandi of the human race since time immemorial.

Reddit had the privilege of hosting user comments, and they squandered the trust they built. Social networks live and die by the good will of their users, creators/users taking back what they made is the consequence of acting in a way that users don't like. Deleting all my comments out of every conversation I had on reddit and destroying all the value is the point, I don't want Reddit to have that value.

> Deleting all my comments out of every conversation I had on reddit and destroying all the value is the point, I don't want Reddit to have that value.

So, "if I can't have it, no one can"? That's something parents typically try to teach toddlers _not_ to do.

It’s my content. I can do whatever I want with it. I can delete it. I can change it. I can leave it be. It’s not nasty or thoughtless. It’s mine. Who is anyone else to tell me whether I want to take my own content down?

It messes up the threads. Sure, I don't mind. Like, it doesn't make you a bad person. But I would prefer it not being possible at bulk in forums. Maybe, 10 deletes per year if you accidentally write some PI or something.

I like how HN allows deletes for some time. At multiple occasions I have deleted some comment that was flame or stupid after 10s and saved others the trouble of reading it.

It's yours until it becomes a part of conversation, at which point it's no longer just yours.

Just like when you contribute a brick to build a house only to yank it out later on because "it's yours". Yeah, you can do it, but it's a selfish move disrespectful of other contributors.

How ironic that Reddit's new API limits are likely causing an uptick in calls leading up to the change...

Not just mass archival / reads, but also database writes from Shreddit usage, etc.

Have you found a quick way to transfer all your subreddit subscriptions and saved posts?

I would prefer short-lived anon accounts but have been too lazy to write a script to transfer those myself.

I save the posts I really care about in my browser bookmarks or copy/paste the valuable contents to a note on my phone. For subs, if I don't resub then I wasn't really interested. Starting a new anon account is a good way to get rid of the cruft in your home feed.

I have gone over to fullquote any comment I make on reddit because of this toxic style. It's not exclusively your comment anymore if you post it to a public place.

You know what I love? Finding threads like this in

> OP: Posts a question

> Anon: [deleted by shreddit/PowerDeleteSuite/whatever]

> OP: Thanks, that solved my issue!

It's a modern version of https://xkcd.com/979/ !

I also used shreddit a year or two ago. Though for more personal reasons. It's so great I could delete my old history completely.

Your posts and comments will still be available in the Pushshift dumps. These have been released as torrents, so there are many thousands of copies of these already.

in my experience, its always the current digital trail that gets anybody interested in more sleuthing

and archives on different sites arent used to link to a current digital trail

Like if you were running for political office, nobody is going to start with the archive to try to match to an unknown current user that they further want to link to the candidate. They’ll start with the candidate and try to link to a current username and then maybe extend that to archives of related usernames.

But if you really nuke and start over you’re fine, people just aren’t that motivated. Your own witness protection program.

Oh yeah I'm sure they are but it was more about the feeling of it. I wish more platforms offered this.

I rotate all my accounts every year or so, same with this one.

Also the Internet Archive.

I wrote this comment a couple years ago, but unless something significant has changed, it still stands.

Be careful. Shreddit does not get rid of all reddit comments, only the ones on your profile. Reddit stores a list of the last 1000 comments and posts you've made to your profile and that list is what Shreddit and 99% of reddit 'deletion' tools use. To truly remove all your comments and posts from reddit, look into reddit-shreddit [0]. Despite the similar name, it is completely different and leverages all your posts and comments from a reddit data request to delete all of your reddit posts and comments. It is infact the only method I have found, except for perhaps a GDPR deletion request, that is truly a complete deletion.

However, this only covers the deletion from reddit itself. There have been periodic reddit archivals ever since it was created. Up to 2015 they were done yearly, ever since they have been done monthly. Since they have always been up for download, all of your reddit data will still be out there, however you can remove your data from the main source of these archives called pushshift. I haven't done it personally but I've seen it said on reddit, you can email the dev of pushshift or dm him on reddit and he will remove your information from his archive.

[0] https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit

The seems to use the same API that is going to be changing pricing, so I assume one either will no longer be able to create the free api keys required in step 4 of that app's setup instructions

The Reddit API will still have a free tier after the changes on July 1st which can be used and Shreddit uses the Reddit API too so it will have the same problem.

Same. I delete my Reddit account, posts, and (sometimes) comments regularly because screw that cesspool.

I do the same thing. I wonder how inflated the subscriber count is on many popular subreddits.

I've been using Redact. Does anyone know the difference between Shreddit and Redact?

Uhhh why don't you apply the standard to HN?

Errr... why not just use their official tool?

https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

I sent in a request and a few days later had a bunch of .csv files containing everything I've done with my account.

OK, CSV isn't JSON - but it's pretty easy to parse or import into a database of your choice.

It's mentioned in the article:

> it's pretty barebones - only the plaintext of the comment, the subreddit name, the timestamp, and weirdly, the number of awards

Oddly the article doesn't mention what else the script in the article exports. Does it do my saved comments and submissions? That's what I'm most interested in.

It says "wait up to 30 days", which feels excessive.

That's the limit according to eu regulation https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

Also probably more complete than shreddit and whatnot. Since I would assume they delete stuff internal data that isn't available publically.

I did it this way as well just to make them work for it.

They should get the Christian from Apollo to make their data /u/ exflitration aide.

Does this confirm they don’t keep data on prior versions of comments that have been edited?

Can't you just add .json to different urls to get it that way?

I just get a page not found.

Your reddit data is already available via torrent, along with everyone else's, but you'll have to dig for it

Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684

>Pushshift

Which has also been shut down by Reddit as part of this whole fiasco. I think March is the last month of archive data available.

Who knows what's going on at this point.

>Pushshift will come back online for mod tools within two weeks; we are creating an approvals process to avoid impersonation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he...

From my read of this, they are basically going from being a complete searchable reddit archive for researchers (and anyone else) to being a archive for the use of Reddit moderators only, and then only for the subreddit they moderate.

Which, assuming Reddit isn't paying them, seems pretty much like "We have decided to allow you to do a bunch of unpaid labor for our profit-making benefit as long as it's not useful to anyone else". No idea what they're getting out of it.

end of 2022 it really starts to fall apart, I think most of the posts are there until March, but comments are missing.

That’s reassuring. There are some subs like StableDiffusion that I don’t want to lose. So much original work and history on Reddit.

> Your reddit data is already available via torrent, along with everyone else's, but you'll have to dig for it

you'll have to digg for reddit

FTFY

2TB for 16 years of reddit comments. I would have thought larger.

All this debate regarding Reddit makes me wonder do we even need these communities. HN sure has value to offer but something like Reddit and YouTube are huge waste of time. Before 2000s people lived their life without these communities. They lived without the constant influx of info and opinions from others. And it seems they were way more happy than us. Probably because they were more focused on solving their own problems than global problems. Who knows if that's exactly the thing we need to solve global problems.

None of the online communities are necessary to live a happy life, not even HN.

> something like Reddit and YouTube are huge waste of time

When people say this I wonder, what planet are they from? When my wife and I are away from one another we get a kick out of sharing Reddit posts with each other. YouTube is one of the best ways to learn new subjects. Both platforms are a great way to stay involved in a hobby.

Hacker News is great, but it's pretty much a glorified subreddit. There's almost no difference.

And for those suggesting there are better alternatives than Reddit, what are they? Facebook? (Barf.) Reddit is doing something very annoying with their APIs, but for what it does it's pretty much the only game in town for now. I might look at browser plugins to make their website easier to use.

It strikes me as the attitude of someone not familiar with the platforms. I can recognize their evils and harms while still appreciating how mind-bogglingly much I've learned from them.

The issue is that all tech companies treat their products as all-or-nothing options. It is not theoretically impossible for YouTube to exist without terrifying levels of data-harvesting, unfair creator monetization, and the weird shit they do with kids.

>Hacker News is great, but it's pretty much a glorified subreddit. There's almost no difference.

i think you stopped using reddit in 2009 or something, hn is akin to what reddit's tech subreddits USED to be.

Right but not for any technical reason. HN has what I presume to be excellent moderators, plus it has simple momentum.

I find it baffling that anyone is unable to see the value of YouTube. There are incredible resources available on YT for a wide variety of topics and interests. There are multiple categories where nothing else comes close anymore (e.g. cooking, gardening, movie reviews, live music recordings, architecture). There are amazing math, science, and programming videos. There are great interviews with a wide range of people. There are people who break down guns, electronics, etc. and explain how they work. You are really missing out if you use YT to watch the default recommended content.

Subreddits are not communities like forums were, on forums you'd get your regular cohort of people alongside newcomers and you'd start to recognise names, in jokes etc.

I don't think Reddit has that same vibe, I barely 'know' anyone on the subreddits I frequent as the nature of it is transitory, at least for the topics I'm interested in, people will stop by to ask a question and leave or lurk.

That's not to say I don't enjoy using Reddit, it's just not the same as forums.

i politely disagree. as another commenter pointed out it depends on the size and overall subreddit visibility.

you can find visible and recognized posters just like you would any online forum in smaller subreddits centered around a thing like writing, programming, music.

check out r/zen for example where there is absolutely an infamous user: ewk and quite a few other regs who engage him in healthy (and perhaps.. toxic, depending on your worldview) discussion(s).

Forums are a way better method of discussion and storing useful information. I still find information on my cars from forum posts 15 years ago. They're usually a smaller community without the big overseer admins of sites like reddit and shitbook, waiting to nuke your entire forum for something they (or now their Ai) view as a transgression. Some of my best friends I met on car forums when I was in college, and our board is still going strong.

I will agree youtube is super useful though.

While it is true that larger subreddits are unlike forums in that sense, smaller and medium subs can be very much like that.

It's hard to have a good sense of community when you have thousands or even millions of participants.

That said, I remember the earlier days of reddit with lots of novelty accounts. I think these days the only surviving novelty accounts I've seen are Shitty Watercolor and Poem for Your Sprog.

I disagree. There’s a huge amount of garbage out there, sure, but some communities are super active and can be used for learning. Take the PowerShell community for example or SysAdmin. I pop on those regularly to ask and answer questions. Google questions related to IT (and I’m assuming other areas of interest) and I bet there’s a Reddit post that comes up in the top 5-10 results (along with stack and other well known forums).

I'm not positive but this might be the most out of touch comment I've ever seen. You can literally learn anything on YouTube. Coding, drywalling, fine carpentry, fix your own car, build an EV from the ground up, how to grow certain types of plants, discover more about the universe.

I don't get it either. YT is a crazy good resource. It just can't be that hard to see.

> do we even need these communities

Absolutely. Though I think we go back to individual sites/forums (like HN is for startup/tech basically) instead of centralized platforms like reddit.

These forums still exist and are still out there and used by everyday people. Every one of my reddits that I follow has some other alternative forum that is active. Some examples, of of the top of my head: AVS Forums [1] for home theater advice (instead of r/hometheater), or Home Barista [2] instead of r/espresso, or Road Bike Forums [3] etc.

I actually don't mind the reddit charging for their APIs and making money for this convenience of single sign-on, cross searching, discoverability, moderation, user rating, etc...

People should just use the regular apps, which work plenty fine, and move on with their life. Or, pay the third-party apps so they can afford the api usage.

[1] https://avsforums.com/ [2] https://www.home-barista.com/ [3] https://www.roadbikereview.com/forums/

While forums are fine, their UX is usually inconsistent at best, and often just bad. Plus you lose out on a few quality of life things, like a single login, cross-posts, and saved posts.

Exactly, which I implied in listing out all the other pros that I listed for reddit.

Useful niche communities for every hobby, profession, etc

Is Lemmy the leading candidate for a viable reddit replacement? Are there any other serious efforts in this space?

HN has such an insane depth of talent that I am surprised I haven't seen a few ShowHN posts that read something like:

"Hi guys, I was bored last weekend so I thought it would be fun to build a reddit clone as a single Rust binary with an imbedded bespoke graph database. It uses a fine tuned LLaMA model for optional auto-moderation. So far it's handling sustained 1.6M / posts sec on my 2015 MacBook Pro. If I have some time this next week I will add distributed mode with Raft or CRDTs. Hope you guys like it."

The people who would enjoy building a reddit really don't want to run a reddit. The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.

Why would building it require running it? It's just software. There can be a separate installation of it per community. Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum.

> The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.

The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure.

I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations.

I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!)

Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)

I think the "subreddit" form being the decentralized aspect to a greater hub would be a better format than lemmy, which is basically a whole reddit that can attach to other reddits. Want a community? Run an instance equivalent to a subreddit for your topics. Want an offtopic or a circle jerk sub? two more instances.

The only real censorship power the main hub would have would be a de-listing, but it wouldn't take down the instance entirely.

Reddit actually used to be open source until mid-2017: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

> There can be a separate installation of it per community.

"Reddit - Dive into anything". You will kill the UX with such separation.

> I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit"

I've been building a platform to target this specific thing. It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. In order for a creator to capitalize on this they currently tend to leverage a combination of different platforms like Patreon, Discord and Reddit with their community often times spread out amongst the different platforms. What we've done is combine everything into a singular place to allow them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content.

https://sociables.com/creators/

People keep suggesting Lemmy but I think decentralized social media is preferred by technical people like us. But in real world only centralized social media seems to work. So why not adopt a model that will be good in the long run, how about something like Wikipedia non-profit Reddit alternative?

Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative

[0]: https://codidact.com/

There already is a wikipedia social network created by Jimmy Wales himself.

https://wt.social

I have a 1:1 clone of old.reddit in my PC already, I built it for fun a few months ago. It's a one week task for a senior web developer anyway. The thing is though, most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. It's just not worth the stress IMO.

> most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps.

Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that.

"Most people" will take notice when the people who made Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while, with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it's walking dead right now.

And then there is IP blacklisting, prevent login after 5 tries, rate managing, all the edge cases ...

And thus, 'reaperman's law was born.

Personally I think the best alternatives are what we’ve already been using: discourse, Matrix, Mastodon, Zulip, Github Issues, and community forums.

For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that instead of creating a new platform someone should create a “hub”: a centralized aggregator which presents all of these platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments; but it doesn’t host the instances or posts themselves, it just uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived / scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons being:

- The platforms I mention already exist for many communities, and there’s already a lot of difficulty in finding content. This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing off their content

- Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers, easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but decentralized instances works well.

- Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there’s no hub which supports all of these platforms together.

- I’ve only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap.

I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many unfortunately, don’t have the time or networking ability to start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar which seems like it’s actually getting momentum I will try to contribute

Interesting idea. In a sense this is also kind of "decentralized" in terms of hosting because you are just using the APIs, and the service itself will just be provided via a client managing the credentials. But I don't quite understand how this will be so different from Matrix has been doing. Basically, the application is just a centralized hub with bridge to different communities. Wouldn't this just be a "yet another standard" situation?

Yes.

What makes this approach really stand out is that, even if there are 5 different aggregators, it doesn't matter, because they're all aggregating the same data. And even if someone decides to use one of the existing platforms (e.g. discourse), posts/comments from this aggregator to the platform still show up. So this is actually a way to alleviate the "yet another standard" issue (though I acknowledge it won't be as good as a single common instance, due to different formats).

Matrix is a start. But when I go to https://matrix.org/, I see a giant header and "Try Now". When I go to https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/, I see a bunch of clients. When I go to https://app.element.io/#/welcome and click "Explore Rooms", I see random forums including some russian forums.

I think that you go to the site hub, you should immediately see a feed of curated popular posts and a "Create Account" form, similar to https://reddit.com/r/all, along with a search bar and list of filters. And when you create an account, you choose some suggestions and get presented with various communities, also like Reddit. Most people are barely even going to try your site, if you want them to join and put real effort into contributing you need to present good content as fast as possible.

Another issue with Matrix is that a lot of content just isn't on Matrix. As well as Reddit and other existing communities. For example, Rust has a subreddit, discourse, Matrix forum, and Zulip, and probably a discord somewhere too. There should really be a single platform where I can see posts from all of this, because I'm definitely not going to be checking each one individually.

I created a read-only version of something like this[1] to view discussions across subs/hn/lobsters/tildes/substack for any given link. I really like the idea of what you're suggesting.

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/finding-interesting-comments-dis...

The hardest part about making a new reddit isn't the technical side

Exactly. It should be more like:

"I hacked this together with the worst code you've ever seen and the server is crashing every 5 minutes, but a thousand people signed up today and usage is growing exponentially."

Hmm I assumed the opposite. The mass exodus of long time users who are pissed about the API changes won't happen until there is a destination that can handle the migration without servers going down. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Time will tell where majority groups migrate to, I'm mostly afraid it will be ever more fractured islands that slowly fade for a good long while before one dominant platform slowly gains traction again as was the case with Reddit.

Lemmy looks a little too technical for majority users to consider I'm afraid.

That's looking to be the case. Same thing happened with Usenet and the migration to web forums because Usenet became a complete mess.

Some are going to Tildes. Some are going to Lemmy, though the two most popular servers are dying right now. Enough went to kbin.social that they disabled registration. Then there's mentions of Raddle and Mainchan depending on your preference.

Discord servers with forums seem to be the big one from what my oldest was showing me. Seems that plus some additional web forums will end up filling in the gap.

Reddit will probably still last for a while as it bleeds out users. We'll have to see what replaces Reddit. Nothing proposed so far is going to be the new consolidated home.

I’m building one, but I don’t think it merits a Show HN. You can check it out at https://flingup.com

I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android and MacOS, one of the top hacker news apps on the app stores. I have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I describe it as a “Decentralized public community of communities for sharing links, text and media. “

I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. Here’s what I have so far. Got the post submissions and community creations working:

https://imgur.com/a/mim2X9H

I shared some implementation details here if people want to read more:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...

Looking forward to this. I hope it goes well.

I read through those threads a bit, but I'm wondering if you can say a bit more about why you didn't use the nostr protocol as is? I'm not trying to pull for criticism, I'm curious about the tech choices and how some of these emerging options differ from one another (I think I've read about two other nostr forum ideas now?)

Nostr is pretty good and I was inspired by its idea. However, I didn’t like a few things and that’s why I decided to build my own protocol.

1. Nostr relies on Schnorr scheme for signing the data. While from my research, the patent on it has expired, I also read some other details on how there’s other pieces of it which are still patented. I am not a legal expert, so my understanding on this might be wrong and it might be in the clear.

2. Schnorr is fairly new and not used widely yet. It’s not even built natively in Crypto Subtle which comes built-in in all browsers.

Based on this alone, I couldn’t use Nostr. My implementation uses ECDSA P-384 keys which can be generated using the browser built in crypto subtle library:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenPar...

So this allows one less third party library to rely on the client side.

3. The 3rd reason (and this was one of my biggest reasons) was that Nostr runs on websockets. I didn’t like that at all. Servers are already limited on the number of sockets they can handle. Plus it seemed like unnecessary complexity when vast majority of the developers already know how to use REST api.

So instead of websockets, mine uses a simple REST api with only 2 endpoints: one for creation of records and other for searching for records based on filters. I shared more details here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/_/jmkpll...

And here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/142v4lu/_/jnasose

Haha, I’d say just wait another day.

But what is the value of reddit anymore? I have one of the oldest accounts, and I loved it.

Last time I logged in (not a joke) it told me I had a new free avatar that was a girl? That I’m stuck with? And I had to pay money to make myself look like a dude?

And we thought hats in TF2 were lame.

I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform and have been specifically targeting content creators to get them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content.

The communities that form around content creators tend to be high in engagement and are a sort of naturally occurring beacon for connecting like minded people together online. That is the core of social networking after all.

https://sociables.com/creators

There have been and will continue to be numerous alternatives created all the time. The problem is creating a clone of X is rarely ever going to succeed, simply because cloning products doesn't create a compelling reason to leave the original (unless you have the resources/network effects of e.g. Meta). You can check r/redditalternatives for a constant stream of projects.

This exists:

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Sometimes best alternative is just absence.

I think the closest analog is Tildes.

https://tildes.net/

I'm not sure it'll be possible to create rich archives of your own data once Reddit's API changes go through, so I made a tool that creates a SQLite archive of everything (that you can update over time).

Thank you! I'll try it later.

As a sidenote, the circuit-y background of your site makes it unreadable with Dark Reader addon. I disabled it for your site and it looks great, but maybe you would like to check it.

Thanks for flagging! I'll take a look- I'm not familiar with that extension. It does auto color-changing, so I hadn't thought about it.

It happened to me too, but I would say more an issue with the extension's logic than the site. I think it tried to reverse small-looking elements with logic that they won't be too bright.

I'm on android with my theme set to dark, couldn't read the text without a lot of difficulty as the circuit almost matched the colour of the font.

Thanks for mentioning, I'll take a look!

Is there a way to get past the 999 comment limit?

That's a limit on Reddit's side. To download more, you need to download your GDPR archive and import it using this tool. There's a command for that.

Ah, thanks!

Can you not do a GDPR request for all your data? (Or the California equivalent)?

You can, but it's different (and less complete) data

Huh. So apparently I'm in the minority here- I point a browser at www.reddit.com , skim a few favorite forums, maybe make a comment or two then do something else for the rest of the day.

IOW, is the sky not falling for my use-case?

It is. You can enjoy your favorite forums because moderation tools exist. They won't.

I'd be surprised if huge amounts of moderation were necessary in forums about ceramic grilling, Linux laptops and cellular service, though.

And you seriously think spammers care your space is about ceramic grilling?

Most people browse reddit on their primary media consumption device which is their smartphone. Most people use a browser on their phone that is not AdBlock capable. Reddit with ads is obnoxious IMO.

Adguard DNS works pretty well for me. I just use the Reddit web app on mobile.

> mobile

Yeah, I'm either on my laptop, or the official(?) Reddit Android app if I'm bored outta my skull somewhere and need something to look at (which is very rarely).

Same but using Firefox with uBlock.

I use the browser on my phone

>I point a browser at www.reddit.com

Shocked anyone tolerates this horrible interface over old.reddit.com

I don't tolerate the new Reddit, I prefer it. It's nice how the new one shows posts large enough to read/see them while scrolling, resulting in a lot less clicking overall. Normally I dislike newer web design, but they did an ok job not bloating it up like Twitter and Facebook.

I also point my browser to www.reddit.com, but have I have the old interface enabled in my user settings. The domain old.reddit.com is not required to use "old reddit".

Also user of the regular plain vanilla site. Shocked that people get so passionate about this thing.

Queue the, “I’m leaving the community!” posts I guess.

"Get New Reddit" is in orange at the top of the window; I'm still using the old interface (via cookies, I guess).

I wanted to learn about D8-THC the other day from firefox focus, on the reddit mobile site, and since it has to do with a drug, it did not give me an option to view on the mobile site, either download the app or go to the home page.

Like c'mon. Every other site doesn't care I'm using a permanent incognito window except for reddit.

Old.reddit.com isn’t that great on mobile, i.reddit.com (recently disabled) was better IMO.

The upcoming API change seems to primary affect three use cases:

1. Moderators used many tools (including bots) which relied on the API to improve their moderation abilities. This indirectly impacts all users to some degree.

2. Users with disabilities often used third party apps to improve the site's accessibility. This significantly impacts a small portion of users with disabilities.

3. Most third party app users had concerns about the UX of the official Reddit app and mobile site - or at least wanted to get rid of ads. This is probably the least use case in terms of "importance", but directly impacts the largest portion of users.

I'm part of that third group. For me, the sky is definitely not falling. But the degraded usability of the mobile site creates enough friction that I will probably reduce my Reddit usage quite significantly. Frankly, Reddit is probably doing me a favor by encouraging me to use their site less.

I don't care either. One of the complaints about API restriction is that helpful bots will break, but honestly I find all of those bots annoying anyway.

I made a series of reddit posts that collectively involved a fair amount of research, so I ended up copying them over to my personal website in order to have a better primary source.

But I'll probably run this to grab everything else.

Hehe, many of my articles started as a comment o put too much effort in (eg https://sonnet.io/posts/use-rainbow/ vs https://reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/qsb8wz/_/hkc60bz)

Even 5k people reading content on my site would be better than 50k people skimming through the comment section.

Shameless plug: I've written a utility which delivers you your favourited posts and comments. While it doesn't support backfilling at the moment, you're welcome to take a look: https://github.com/rounakdatta/my-best-of-reddit.

By favourited do you mean upvoted or saved? I'm interested in a tool to do the latter.

https://notado.app has supported importing saved comments (and tweets, and hn comments etc) for a long time now. Even if you don't want an account long-term, you can use it to dump your saved (text) posts to a machine readable format for later.

I think saved posts aren't accessible via the API, happy to be corrected.

Too late? I already lost a ton of data in the covid purge. (was active user of /r/NoNewNormal) Every comment, post or interaction on a banned sub is suddenly deleted permanently with no way to retrieve it. That's really losing data, not a made up crisis of "enshittification."

Most people worried about the API change have the "correct politics" so your data is safe. It's only people who participate in wrongthink that need to backup everything.

Your comments / posts from banned subs are available in your Reddit archive.

This tool has iffy support for adding rich data for deleted comments, but I have some plans.

Archive your Reddit data?

You guys must be using Reddit way differently than I am. It's just a social site. The subreddits I subscribe to are hobby-related. People sharing what they're doing with regards to their hobby. What data would I have to archive? If Reddit were to go away I'd just find another similar service allowing me to hangout with people interested in my hobby.

What are you guys doing?

Writing detailed technical answers to very bespoke problems, writing and creating art as part of a small internet community.

Reddit can be used many ways. Maybe archiving your stuff isn't important to you and that is fine.

Wow! Okay, I've learned some people are using Reddit very differently than I've been. I can see why you would want to archive your data.

As I side note, I have a peculiar fascination with how people use tools so differently, how they work them into their workflows and make them their own.

I wrote short stories on Reddit for around two years, mostly for fun and practice. Nothing that needs to be saved, but it's nice to have this kind of thing around if you want to look back in the future!

> The non-monetary value Reddit as a knowledge store is literally priceless; it's a modern-day Library of Alexandria.

Is it though?

It's mostly a modern day graffiti covered bathroom wall, but it's also unfortunately got some good knowledge trapped in it, from between the collapse of forums and the rise of Discord respectively as primary niche hobby gathering places.

>These changes mark the beginning of the (apparently) inevitable enshittification of Reddit as a platform

This started long ago, when the new UI was announced. This was the first obvious "we're going to make it worse for everybody because that's how we operate and there's nothing you can do about it" step for me.

At least until now, we could mostly ignore it. It's gotten much more forceful; I'm now worried about old.reddit.com more than I was before.

What is funny is there seems to feeling of urgency to get data from Reddit even though it's basically the users who are making subreddits private. The protest really does seem to me like a "cut my nose off to spite my face" protest.

Realistically, there are ways to protest that increase costs. Everyone uploading 20minute videos of their wall for example. That would increase costs but not really affect how user's use the site. People want to hit their pockets yet all they can think of "If we don't use it, that'll hurt them" when if it really hurt them they wouldn't allow it. They own and control the site, they can make it impossible to make subreddits private with probably a few minutes of code - just make the process error out for a few days and then remove the error at the start of the request.

> What is funny is there seems to feeling of urgency to get data from Reddit even though it's basically the users who are making subreddits private.

The reason to archive your content is because (1) you want to delete your account or (2) losing access to a free API will make it difficult to do later.

Subreddits going dark is just a day long protest, no one needs to archive content due to that.

> The protest really does seem to me like a "cut my nose off to spite my face" protest.

It's a bit of both - reddit exists and is profitable because of user engagement/activity.

Reddit is shutting down primary way many (most?) user prefer to access it.

The symbolism of making communities dark isn't just to hurt Reddit; it's also to forshadow the state of the apparent NewWorld reddit is ushering in.

> Reddit is shutting down primary way many (most?) user prefer to access it.

I doubt that most people using reddit use third party apps. I even doubt many people do.

I think the primary goal here is to make Reddit less useful on your way out, pulling copies of your data for yourself but removing them from the platform is just one good way to do that.

Am I the only person in the world that just uses a browser to access Reddit? No ads, no nags, no idiotic crippled "app" interface on a postage-stamp screen...

No. But most people who aren't affected aren't going to take the time to comment and say "This doesn't affect me." Most of the people being vocal about these recent reddit changes are those people affected by the changes. It can feel like it's doom and gloom and the end of reddit when you read comments about it, but in reality, it probably affects a very small percentage of reddit users. (Though from what I hear, it might affect a large percentage of the mods. So _that_ might end up having effects on the larger user base. We'll have to see how that plays out.)

I just tried installing this from my very new Linux install (I didn't even have pip installed!) and got the following error:

  File "/home/XXX/.local/pipx/venvs/reddit-user-to-sqlite/lib/python3.10/site-packages/reddit_user_to_sqlite/reddit_api.py", line 1, in <module>
    from typing import Any, Literal, NotRequired, Optional, Sequence, TypedDict, final
    ImportError: cannot import name 'NotRequired' from 'typing' (/usr/lib/python3.10/typing.py)

Works well to just spin up a python:3.11 container via Docker or Podman and do the pipx + reddit-user-to-sqlite installations, then run the utility in there. You can mount some folder as part of starting the container or copy the reddit.db file out of the container before throwing it away. Avoids any changes to your real system at all.

sad thing is that if your username is banned - it gives error... cool thing is that you can pull any username you want... (unless banned as stated)

You are on Python 3.10, you need 3.11.

Ah that is the latest I have available on Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS.

Ah apologies, the other commenter looks to be correct that it needs 3.11. The typing imports honestly aren't important, so I might be able to pull them out of the runtime.

This only gives you 1000 posts. You'll need to ask Reddit for an archive of all of your data. Their SLO is 30 days. I doubt that now given the madness going on.

Why did people not get this apoplectic when Twitter and Facebook killed 3rd party clients?

They don't rely as much on unpaid outsiders to run their communities. As in, you're more likely to get banned altogether from Twitter or Facebook by some automated system, while Reddit relies on volunteer moderators so most of the time, bans will be on a per sub basis by those volunteers.

On top of that, afaik, Facebook and Twitter didn't try to spread lies about 3rd party devs using the drama as leverage to blackmail them. I don't recall much about when Facebook did it, but with Twitter, I think Musk was pretty straight with saying that those 3rd party apps cost money to support and he'd rather do it in house.

Finally, Reddit relies on volunteer moderators, but does not (and has for years promised but failed to) offer the associated tools moderators need. So all those are third party things which also end up in doubt with these changes. With the way Reddit have attempted to deny that they want to kill 3rd party apps despite it being obvious, and the lies about devs, I think it'd leave an even more sour taste to everyone if they tried to carve out an exemption for specifically moderation tools, since it'd make it even more apparent what their goal is.

Probably because Reddit's mobile pretense was literally born on third party apps, as there was no official mobile client for years.

Plus - it's the manner in which Reddit has conducted themselves here. Not just the fact they are making the changes, but how they went about making them.

I did delete all my tweets and my Twitter account. But the majority of people don't take action or aren't aware of what's going on, in the general case. So they passively suffer a worsening user experience forever or until there's a big enough crowd for them to follow to a new option.

Reddit/Twitter only caring about short term metrics and survival don't care about the further out timeline.

I deleted my account when they killed Tweetbot. It was a reminder of how much contempt they felt for their users and it prompted me to do something I'd been idly considering for a while anyway.

Why is there a 1K comment limit and can you add a way to override that? Just hitting the reddit API looks like it will fetch further back.

I looked at my 1000th comment in the archive and it's only back to Sat May 28 2022 (I guess I comment a lot), if I want to save 10+ years I'll need a higher limit.

Edit: Looks like this might a reddit limit? I'm seeing other tools mention 1K. I guess I'll use Reddit's data export tool instead.

1k limit is a reddit limitation, not this specific tool

Yep, Reddit's paging API only gives you the most recent 1k each of comments and posts.

I'd suggest starting by fetching recent posts, then download your GDPR archive and run it through the tool as well (the `archive` command). Then it'll be as if you fetched everything from the web API (best of both worlds).

Boy, I sure can't wait until 2 days after this "strike" occurs when people can move on to whatever we're supposed to be outraged about next. Most people (a) have a better version of information actually worth saving already saved somewhere else, and (b) have zero use for their reddit posts without the context surrounding the post.

Just backed up my data, ~60 posts and ~1000 comments. Thank you! Worked flawlessly (except for pythons incredibly convoluted package system for dabblers like me, but that’s not your fault)

Feature request: delete all comments and posts (can only be done 1 by 1 afaik). There used to be a nuke Reddit chrome extension but it appears removed and/or out of date.

Glad it worked well for you!

I think that's out of scope for this project, but I've seen some other comments in this thread linking to tools that do just that!

I wonder whether AT Proto, the protocol used in bluesky, might make for a good base for a decentralized reddit alternative.

- public

- extensible

- bring your own client

- domains as usernames

- federated but with escape hatches so you're never tied to a single host

- considerations for twitter-scale from the start, eg with "big graph servers"

Still under a waitlist / closed for now / under very active development, but seems very promising.

I delete all my accounts every year or so. I don’t understand people’s fascination with their own data online. It’s mostly less than worthless, so their fascination with storing stuff they will never read again is weird.

I have a friend who, back in 1998 or 1999, printed out all his emails. He was really active on IRC so he had a lot of email, and he wasnt savvy enough to know he could copy his mbox. He carried those papers around with him for decades and finally realized he never flipped through them once so he recycled them all. I think that’s the case with almost all the data that we produce. It’s not useful for us, but probably useful for companies like Google to create models of our thought patterns.

My misc digital personas have gone to the great /dev/null in the sky many times.

BIX, CompuServe, FidoNet, usenet, dozens of email accounts, voicemails, interviews, chat logs, facebook...

Heck, I have zero trace of the specialty BBS (and network) I hosted. Which was my everything at the time.

Young me thought it'd be great to record and archive my lifestream.

Current me is glad it didn't work out.

Sure, I may have written some clever bits of code & prose.

Now I see great value in forgetting. It's hard to adapt, grow, accept, forgive, and be forward looking while lugging around a lifetime of baggage.

If I ever did say something useful, I'm confident someone will pick up the thread. Whether independently or by quoting me, it's all good.

This is akin to saying get all your trash back from the landfill before it closes.

I got chased off Reddit by a cabal of power hungry woke mods stalking me. I'm going to be celebrating when Reddit becomes the next Digg. They did it to themselves and deserve everything that's coming to them.

Imo, the most valuable data to save is not what you have posted, but the things that you have read that have made a substantial difference in how you view and exist in the world.

AKA memes from r/AdviceAnimals

Any different from https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request ?

The post says that that data is barebones whereas the tool can get much more.

Though the only field they show that's not in the GDPR export is the subreddit, which you can get by parsing the URL

They discuss that in the article:

  Reddit does have a feature to export your data into a GDPR archive, but it's pretty barebones ... the highest fidelity data comes from the API.

The API is limited though. It cannot retrieve all historical data.

Does this include any contextual data surrounding your posts, like what you replied to, etc? That seems to me to be as important as what someone has written.

not in the data dump, but it has a permalink. I could store the comment chain, but it'll balloon the number of API requests and storage size pretty spectacularly. It _does_ capture the title of the post that your comment is in, if that's helpful!

Can you please add this as an option? Context is extremely important. If it's also possible to save the content of the post, that would also be extremely useful.

Finally one additional suggestion which I guess might be doable (?) would be to submit the post URL to archive.org and include the archived URL in the database dump.

Awesome, I really wanted something like this. I have a lot of reddit posts and it would be neat to cringe at my younger self.

Does it capture saves and upvotes too? I use those actions more than posting and commenting.

It doesn't, but you could probably trick it into loading those from your GDPR archive (by renaming the file).

Data-wise, what additional data does this include compared to Reddit's default export?

Yeah, great question! This includes markdown instead of plaintext, the upvote/downvote score, controversiality, and more. It can grab anything out of a full comment response: https://www.reddit.com/user/xavdid/comments.json

I would love to be able to download and archive all the posts I ever upvoted. Honestly that would have more value to me than my own comments. Does anyone know if there is a project for this?

This project could be made to support it, but it currently runs without auth. there's an endpoint for it: https://www.reddit.com/user/USERNAME/upvoted.json

> When I heard the news, I realized I'd be upset if I wasn't able to access my contributions anymore.

Clearly all I’ve put on Reddit is dross. I can’t think of anything I’d care about losing.

There's also: https://github.com/aliparlakci/bulk-downloader-for-reddit

@xavdid Very nice tool. I was able to trivially find my earliest post (17 yrs ago). With comments, sorting on the timestamp only went back to 2021, though. Is this a feature?

The paging API only gives back 1k comments (which for you is apparently back to 2021). You can request your GDPR archive from Reddit and point the tool at it and you'll have a more complete archive.

%s/Archive/Delete/g

Done!

(And, the process was really easy, just as the blog post described. Requires Python 3.11+.)

Please delete all my old stuff. Esp the embarrassing comments and likes.

I figure I'll get sent to the gulag sooner or later anyway.

imo this is not the beginning of reddit’s enshittification. if one can even pick a beginning that is probably when they started the redesign.

What reddit data do people care about?

If you hope Reddit dies, you are also indirectly hoping for HN to become more like Reddit, because that will be one of the consequences.

This is very helpful! Thanks

The GDPR / CPRA data request allows for downloading all data.

https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

Has anyone here tried it? I'm curious what kind of formatting is used for the data dump.

"before it's too late"? Is GDPR being repealed or something? Kind of a FUD title.

Reddit's API is changing (and getting worse) at the end of the month. They haven't exactly said what is changing, but they've mentioned that:

- there will be stricter limits

- NSFW content won't be served through the API

So depending on how you use Reddit, this sort of export may not be possible in the same way after the cutoff.

There is information missing in the GDPR dumps that's available in the current API. Things like `score`. Whether that matters to you is up for debate; but access to that delta is likely going away.

I always thought "reddit is cesspool" was a meme. I made an account a month ago after lurking for months and good god its worst than i imagined. It was fun when browsing and commenting on small subs but write anything in the bigger one and you'll get swarmed. Just don't steer from any of these narratives : 1.America is always good. They never did anything bad. They saved the world and they're heroes. 2. Apple is god. 2. China and Russia are very bad. American invasions were justified. 3. Chinese,product, companies are all bad. All they do is copy the almighty American companies.

Idk what subs you hang out in, but in most of the subs I follow one of the easiest ways to farm upvotes is to simply trash on the USA. I see one of those "Stop complaining about your life. There are literally people living in The USA." memes[0] at least once every couple weeks and it always performs well. "America bad" is a very well known trope in the Reddit comments.

[0] https://i.redd.it/you8wci1y7x51.jpg

> 1.America is always good. They never did anything bad. They saved the world and they're heroes.

What subs did you look at? My experience on Reddit is the exact opposite. There's even a subreddit where people whine about people whining about how awful America is: https://old.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/

> 2. Apple is god.

What subs did you look at? Even /r/apple frequently hates Apple.

> 2. China and Russia are very bad.

I do see these sentiments a lot.

> American invasions were justified.

What subs did you look at? What invasions are we talking about?

> 3. Chinese,product, companies are all bad. All they do is copy the almighty American companies.

I see this one a lot. Especially on subreddits devoted to military hardware and any time someone mentions TikTok.

I think the truth is that people remember the things that evoke an emotional response. It sounds like you get upset when you hear people say bad things about China and when you hear people say good things about America. You forget, or just don't read, all of the comments that contradict those people.

1 and 3 : I don't look at the sub i just type the comment. When i see a comment about china or Russia being the root of all evil i sometimes remind them of the atrocity their country commited. The hypocrity of "invasion is bad unless it's me or my friends" make me sick to my stomach. The answer? "yes, but they are terrorists"....

When Russia started invading Ukraine and there was a global shortage of grain. I saw a lot of comments about starving 3rd world countries that dared to still be friends with Russia.

3. Apparently "Huawei was killed by US because it was too good and getting too big" is a completely delirious thinking.

On one instance i was downvoted to hell and made fun off for saying that any secret document worth declassifying isn't really a secret document. As an exemple, i cited the kidnapping of random civilians and sending them to prison to be raped and tortured to death by the US soldiers for fun and the videos about targeting civilians and kids with drones while laughing and making jokes about the kids growing to be terrorist anyway. Both of these only saw the light of day because of wikileaks and were a huge embarrassment to US that never wanted them to be known.

What irked me the most is i was told to grow up and touche some grass because apparently it's a teenager phases to care about these things (for some reason they talk to me as if i was an american )

As for your last statement, it's not that i get upset when good things is said about America. I may be extremely paranoid but am more like scared. As someone living in instable country with oil and therfore may be next on the US oil crusade. when i read anything america did and them prising their killing capabilities, i just look at my family and imagine that maybe one day i'll be excavating their dead bodies from under the rubbles of our home after a drone strike while the operator is drinking mountain dew and making a joke with his buddies about a having good day of work.

It's probably my depression.

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