They really scared about Lemmy?
Being so blatant about this shit... I have learned the following:
They do not like subreddits going NSFW it makes them no money. I for one welcome all furries and rule 34 artwork to Reddit.
They do not like people promoting Lemmy, any kind of competition gets them trying every tactic they can muster, playing all their cards now.
They do not like people deleting or removing data from Reddit. You know what would suck? A GDPR deletion request... That would be a real damn shame.
No data to sell then lol
I just want to add that as a European citizen you also have a right to get a copy of all your data, and an explanation how and when this data has been used.
Also, I'm pretty sure that their response "you first have to delete your comments manually" does not comply with EU guidelines.
Wouldn't they have to have some sort of presence in the EU? If all of their operations are US based (I don't know if they are or not), can the EU really do anything about it?
Outside of Europe, the UK and California you probably won't have much luck to be honest, as they do not legally have to comply with you if you are not a citizen of any of those places.
As for if Reddit tells the EU to go away, that is suicide, whilst 49% of users are in the USA the rest of the 51% are everywhere else, that would be a very bad look for investors if the website was blocked in Europe and it would look especially bad for the company to be fined for gdpr non-compliance.
So they would be in worse not to comply... Not to mention the loss in ad revenue. Nobody wants to serve ads when only half the site is going to see them. USA won't be much affected but anyone in the EU will.
They could also increase the fine, and if they still refuse to pay, sue them and seize assets. Either way, a massive headache
Also found this blog post and made the request to Reddit for GDPR data removal. However I removed comments by using the Power delete suite (https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite).
After few hours got email (similar as in the blog post) from reddit and followed by the instructions given in email (basically send as a reddit message confirming account deletion). Few hours passed again and got confirmation email from Reddit "We’ve now flagged your account for irreversible deletion. Please allow some time for this action to complete."
Basically not much effort needed in case you're willing to remove the comments (etc) manually or using scripts, extensions, etc.
However not sure if it would be GDPR compliant for Reddit to leave the comments if the user data is wiped out even if the username is removed from the posts.
I think there will be a lot of random actions in the coming days. Reddit is really mad right now and admins are taking random actions that are later overruled because it's bad optics.