As of today, almost all political and news content is gone from both the front page and /r/all.
This is part of the larger effort to censor and control the audience. It appears to be working.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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Oh well. Fark had a good run. Reddit's had a good run. Someday Lemmy will have had a good run.
'Tis the way of things.
Platform gets popular. Sub mods are powertripping bastards and don't know how to handle the influx. Ban all the good guys. Leave all the bad actors. Things start to go to shit. Owners/operators behind the scene are also powertripping bastards and react to the chaos by having knee jerk reactions and locking the platform down, which drives the userbase away. The end. New platform.
Lemmy is a little more immune to it on a sitewide basis, but I'm seeing the enshittification of individual subs accelerate already.
Open source rules... If a sub turns to dust, anyone who cares can just pick up and start a new one.
Seems like a pretty human pattern - "This looks like a good place to propagate my POV. Anybody I don't agree with gets kicked."
To a point, intolerance paradox and all that.
Very coincidentally, I ended up on Reddit this morning. I was doing some research and saw my old username show up in the search results, so of course I clicked.
Ya'll, when I left Reddit, I used one of those automated tools to edit all my content and change it to gibberish before ultimately deleting it. When I left, not a single post or comment of mine remained in my account history nor in the subs I was active in (I checked). And yet this morning I found out that my old, formerly deleted content was restored at some point in the past 2 - 3 years since I left.
Ain't that some bullshit?
This has been a known thing for a while. This happened to most if not all people who tried scrambling their comments. It was a valiant effort and certainly cost Reddit some money but it didn't work.
Deleting messages and accounts doesn't remove them, it merely marks them as Deleted. The content is still there. According to the docs for tools like shreddit (which I've used myself) which replace comments with gibberish before deleting them, reddit only keeps the most recent copy of content. Based on what you're saying this seems to be wrong - possibly reddit keeps periodic backups. They might even have anti-shredding software that scans for masses of gibberish and restores previous content from one of those backups. Just a theory.
Which, if you actually take the time to read the post, they did.
I read it, apparently I didn't digest it. Rewriting my comment.
Depends on what you used. If you used power delete suite then that was limited by the number of comments accessible on your profile, so one run wouldn't overwrite or delete your comments. You'd have to keep running it over and over again once your profile became repopulated with comments that weren't showing before. So it wasn't something that could be done in one go.
Proper way to do it back then was to put in a request for GDPR, and use those files with reddit api and use shreddit to overwrite and delete all the comments.
shreddit
That one sounds familiar, so it may be what I used.
I confirmed all my comments and posts were gone at that time, and I think I had to run the tool multiple times. In addition, I've heard folks mention that their content was restored after doing this delete, so from time to time I'd go back and check to confirm all my stuff is gone. However, after a while I just never went back to look, so it's likely been well over a year since I last confirmed.
This time it was just really strange to see my former username in the google search results after being away for 2 - 3 years, so I was expecting to click and see [deleted] on my comments. NOPE.
Yeah you have to check that specific comments you deleted remain deleted, since ones that showed up could just be ones that regular automated deleting methods couldn't access at the time due to profile comment display limits.
So the profile might have a limit of displaying 1000 comments and if you ran something like power delete suite it would delete 1000, but if you had more than that like 5000 comments there would be 4000 left that wasn't deleted due to being inaccessible at the time. After some time the next 1000 would show up in the profile that hadn't been viewable before. So you'd basically have to run it like 5 times to delete everything over weeks.
I do remember people recommending to rewrite comments and then delete later in case comments are restored. Some using messages like this comment has be deleted and if you are seeing this it means it has been restored.
That's why you had to do it slowly over time. Not all at once. Common thing they did
It's a common story, unfortunately.
I hope you didn't use redact.dev
It's been years, so I honestly do not recall. What's the story on that specific tool?
Dan Saltman is behind that service and he's aligned with pedophiles, like the streamer Destiny, and supports Israel.
It's rumored that he keeps the information from the scrubbed comments as potential blackmail.
I joined reddit during the great digg migration ~~almost a decade ago~~ a hell of a lot longer than that ago. Joined Lemmy a few years ago but it wasn't quite scratching that itch.
Finally made the switch to https://old.lemmy.world/ (and changed my default sort to be "new comments") while I am at work and I got to say - its working, I feel like I am going back to old reddit when I take my breaks and it was really just the habit and familiarity of the layout that kept me going back there.
Today I learned there's an old.lemmy.world. Regular lemmy.world looked good enough that I never bothered digging deeper. Thanks for the heads up.
Possible upside when they eventually fully kill old.reddit - it will probably mean another influx (small by their standards, big by ours) of users here.
API stubborness is one thing, but a direct, major, in-your-face degradation of the UX will certainly bother more people.
API stubborness is one thing, but a direct, major, in-your-face degradation of the UX will certainly bother more people.
The loss of the 3rd party apps was the in-your-face degradation of the UX
*was one of many degradations of the UX.
the great digg migration almost a decade ago
I've got some bad news gramps...
oh hell, and its gran to you, youngster.
old. user here. You might notice that some features are only on the regular interface. For instance reporting and some settings.
When they started requiring a login to use old. I just stopped going to the site altogether. I made an account here specifically so I could start blocking some of the reddit repost communities, cuz I'm just over it and tired of being reminded of that cesspool.
I hope they do kill old. I hope it means there's a small influx of users here when it happens.
That place is swarming with nazi bots and their app doesn't even work 75% of the time.
It's dead.
They know that the current round of mods will leave once they make another major change so theyve already been testing the waters with AI mods so the entire site is admin and mod AI bots.
I don't know if this will be a controversial statement, but with a few exceptions, I can't imagine an AI mod on reddit being any worse than a human mod on reddit. At worst it's a wash, but I'm leaning towards it being a net improvement.
The AI admins are much worse, they cannot detect tone or sarcasm or context so will ban you if you say the wrong words in a post about CEOs.
I have definitely been banned for sarcastic comments taken literally. Hell, I was banned once for quoting JFK, in context.
I'm still not convinced it will be any worse. Luckily, I don't really have to worry about it anymore.
Depends on the subreddit. Some are major filled with Israeli bots. (Not literal nazi bots, but I assume that's what you meant), others aren't.
I can't say I've ever had any issues with their app (aside from forcing me to use it when I go to the site in a web browser).
Ever since they announced the 'new' Reddit, it was pretty obvious the old Reddit would be killed eventually. It's taking even longer than I actually believed.
Now, the funny thing about it, is the typical hypocrisy surrounding these American companies. First it didn't just allowed, it fully embraced the scraping and AI bots, and now they call it 'bad behavior' and want to prohibit it just so they can be the sole people to use it there (or to charge other companies to allow them to do that).
And maybe I'm being naive, but it feels to me that Reddit is slowly digging it's own grave. I don't believe that there's actually that many people using it nowdays, when pretty much all discussions there are either a) toxic people, full of themselves, fighting over stupid brands and predatory companies; b) stupid memes; c) bots faking they're not bots, or ads faking they're not ads; and d) information that has already been scraped or that was written by AI bots, or that just doesn't hold any real value anymore.
Reddit used, a long time ago, to be a place where actual useful information was posted and good wikis or megathreads were created, curating these information (even though you actually had to some digging to get there sometimes). Nowadays it's an echo chamber of the most useless shit internet has to offer, and all the good data has been moved or copied to somewhere else. But that's what happens when you start to treat the same users that built the whole value of the platform as collateral trash.
uniquely human
lol
lmao even
The quote for those who don't feel like clicking through:
In order to protect our platform, business, and users from abusive scraping and spamming, over time we plan to make changes involving Old Reddit, the legacy desktop web experience for Reddit that was built 21 years ago. In the short term, we will continue to require users to be logged in to access it and will work on migrating critical bots and moderator workflows to our modern stack. These efforts will help us mitigate the bad behavior and give us time to plan the complex follow-up steps.
Reads to me as "we are sick and tired of bots freely scraping our content without paying us", wrapped up somehow as "gotta protect our users". Meanwhile, they clearly do not care about humans having open access to information. But hey, that's just my take.
Frustrating especially to see the shade thrown at the '21 years old design' that's still head and shoulders over anything they've been able to design since. (I guess. Haven't really been there in a handful of years, but I assume it's kept getting worse.)
"we are sick and tired of bots freely scraping our content without paying us
Given the whole API debacle you're almost certainly right.
"Our content" like as if all the folks of reddit created that content in the first place
Good correction! 100%, should have said "our users' content".
They provide the software platform and the hosting, and those aren't nothing. But all the stuff they want to cash in on, they created none of it.
Oh yes, the bot spam coming from non logged in users is a serious problem, totally get it.
Love that they don't allow comments on blog posts, because they know its just going to be a bunch of ppl saying fuck spez
Lol, I could have linked my comment predicting this, if I hadn't deleted it along with the rest of my comments.
Are you sure it's actually deleted? They have been known to restore deleted comments.