Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
EU’s GDPR officers will be very interested in Reddit’s documented inability to delete EU Reddit users’ personal data.
But is a Reddit users post and comment history personal data? If it was submitted freely and not asked for by Reddit as some kind of sign up or usage rights does it fall under GDPR.
Of course data that can be used to identify an individual comes under GDPR so in that case it’s only the users email address and name. Even the user name doesn’t identify an individual.
I am no fan of Reddit but we need to be careful thinking GDPR gives an individual the right to remove non personal content.