That's me and I have zero fucking regrets. Over 12 years I commented with solutions to tech problems. For a few niche problems, my Reddit answer was the only relevant answer Google returned. I sanitized it all. Fuck Reddit. They don't get to profit from me anymore.
I hope you at least provided those answers elsewhere.
Edit: I never said they were obligated to provide the info, but if they were willing to provide it before then I'm sure lots of people who relied on that info would be happy to have an alternative source for the same info, if the person I replied to was willing to provide it again. If not then that's up to them. It's not like I was demanding that they offer it.
Hey, I remembered a thread bashing winrar when thinking about needing a compression software then looked it up to see people's alternative recommendations.
Deleting or using an overwrite script, and the reasoning was because in addition to pushing out 3rd party apps, douchecanoe Huffman was opening up reddit's post history to LLM training, so that was us giving him the finger on the way out. While I agree it sucks for people looking at it from an internet archival perspective, at the time it seemed more imperative to jab the crap out of him and reddit as a business.
What's so bad about that? Even on Lemmy I'm posting things in public, intended to be read by the public, and if somebody wants to train AI on what I've given to the public then good for them. I refuse to use a walled garden. Being proprietorial about online posts is probably not the most effective response to online surveillance. I agree that Huffman is a douchecanoe though.
I think many people just did it because Reddit still benefits from the Google traffic. I wanted results from Reddit to be less useful and I want people to be frustrated when they go to find an answer on Reddit and see it no longer exists.
Oh boy time is flying. I can't believe I've been on Lemmy over 3 months, and have barely used reddit in that time (only for finding answers to my technology questions, like OP lol). I used reddit daily for mant years and quit cold turkey (except the occasional puff).
Aside from not wanting to send any traffic their way, this is another reason I've excluded Reddit from my private search engine's results. Reddit's value has definitely diminished as a direct result of the protest against the API changes.
Many folks deleted their contributions when they migrated away. So it isn't intentionally trying to not help anyone else. It was just protesting against reddit more likely.
Good thing there are tools for viewing old versions of a website (wayback machine for example). At least if there is a snapshot at the time where the comment was not deleted.
And add ons as webarchive allowing easy access to all those tools.
Now wayback doesn't work with normal reddit posts cuz the client side rendering bunged it all up, I just have to pray someone archived it on old.reddit.com
The annoying thing for me is someone posting a question, getting help from the community, and then immediately deleting all their posts assuring that nobody can ever be helped by it again. This is kind of a reverse of that which I would say is probably less common?