Comment by daedalus_j | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daedalus_j | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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