I didn't delete anything, because there's quite a bit of programming & tech advice. I always knew reddit was profiting off my contribution, everybody should have known that from the beginning.
I'll stop contributing, but I don't like how much useful information has gone dark or otherwise suddenly just been lost. I wouldn't burn a library down because they started charging exorbitant late fees, I would just stop going there.
Why I left mine intact. The Reddit "library," as it were, remains one of the largest and most significant public goods online. I think that's more important than burning my contributions in the hopes that Reddit management will do a 180. I also pinned a post advertising kbin/lemmy and Squabbles on my profile.
I'm certainly no longer participating, however, and I don't think Reddit's built to survive only on visitors from Google.
I didn't delete my account, but I did wipe out my post history.
I keep my account active because I've already found a couple of instances where reddit restored my posts in particular sub reddits ands I had to delete them again.
Tech/programming stuff is exactly why I did nuke mine. Going isn't as meaningful if you leave a bunch of value behind when you do. While I'm here for entertainment now, I'm often spending my reddit time during work hours on vendor-hosted support forums, stackexchange, etc. now.
Gradually, that library will be relocated to other places. Instead of just not going, I think it's better to take away others' reasons for going too, give them reason to seek out better libraries.
Good thing is that the content is not lost for those that know to surf the web. But those locations don't help reddit at all (main one is the wayback machine from archive.org and then there is a raw datadump of anyhting up to march 2023 as JSON)
If I deleted my account I would never again get that special feeling of conducting a websearch to solve some problem and finding a hit from a person who looks like they are having exactly the same issue as me, only to find it was me posting 2 years ago and there are no useful responses.
Makes me wonder how identifiable I am by my "accent" online... I must phrase things in unusual ways. And I spend a lot of time trying to solve problems that are either unsolvable or over my head..
I always find this situation crushing, demoralizing and very funny and until lemmy has better search indexing I don't want to give it up.
Also I wrote things I think were useful too. But I don't stumble no them.
Same here, I just stopped using it. I never had the urge to burn the place down.
Not that erasing my paltry contributions over the years will probably have made that much difference but who knows if it helps someone in a future Google search that's a good thing.
Yeah- there is so much information that is more detailed and accurate to specific situations in almost every area that would be lost to the future.
And you literally never know what weird take on a current situation, or what seemingly small detail of information about a field of knowledge might be important to people, historians, etc., in the future. So much of our knowledge is in our inherent understanding of how the world is right now, that we tend to assume that that knowledge will always be there and available, but that's not necessarily the case.
Anyway. I get deleting, or even removing maybe some of the more frivolous content if possible, ("This" "So much this" somes to mind lol) but I think it's ok to preserve that history.