Email from Reddit for age verification on a deleted account

10 points by SurprisedTiger 5 days ago | 4 comments

I just had a peculiar experience with Reddit.

I had an account.

I downloaded my data, used a bot to replace all posts with random sentences (Reddit won't let you delete, but you can edit, so this is what you do), then deleted the account. This was a good two or three years ago.

Today I received an email from Reddit telling me my account may be under-age and they will require age verification.

I went to account recovery, entered the username, received an email to reset the password and lo and behold, I was back in my account.

The account was marked as "permanently banned".

I then deleted the account again, with all the procedural and textual paraphernalia of permanent account deletion.

Reddit when they say "delete" they would seem to be misleading users, and changing only the account status.

seattle_spring 5 days ago |

> used a bot to replace all posts with random sentences

not so pertinent to your main point, but I've got to say: This is absolutely ruining Reddit, and I sure hope they prevent this from happening sometime soon.

Nothing worse than finally finding the answer some some esoteric question, seeing a thread of "wow, that works perfectly, you're a Godsend!", and then getting to the answer itself and finding something like "Urban walrus clover ocean speaker carpet [this comment has been removed by SomeTool]".

al_borland 4 days ago | |

It sounds like this practice is having the intended effect. To hurt Reddit’s reputation for a place to find answers, after their repeated moves to prioritize the advertisers and shareholders over the users who created all the content and made the site what it was. Killing the API, killing 3rd party apps, pushing users on mobile to their app, pushing users to the new UI, littering the site with ads, modals, and general dark patterns… the list goes on.

For what it’s worth, I think the comment editing was originally a practice shared by Reddit itself, back when people still liked them. If a user was going to delete a comment and wanted it truly gone, it should be edited first before deleting, to make sure what is left in the DB doesn’t still have the data the user was trying to delete. Back when this was shared, the expectation was that the comment would be deleted anyway, so the edit didn’t really matter. Now that they are blocking deletes, people can see how much this actually happens.

With Reddit being a popular source for LLMs, I wonder how this will impact training as well, and if that will hurt the value of their data.

SurprisedTiger 4 days ago | | |

Dammit. LLMs. I should have posted incorrect answers!

SurprisedTiger 4 days ago | |

That's 100% and totally me :-)

I specialized in a particular esoteric subject.

My moral compass says they do not own my content. I spent 10 years figuring it out at the costs of many tens of thousands of dollars. I'm happy to post on their site to help others, but when Reddit says "this is mine and I own it, and BTW I'm also behaving like a total dick these days", they can fuck right off.