You are polluting the data set. Do it a few times with different text sources and the scrubbers won't know what part of your comment history is good. Replace, don't delete.
I'm pretty sure they'll know that the first version of each comment is almost certainly the good one. People sometimes edit a comment to add new information or fix a typo, but they almost never replace nonsense with a good comment, rather than the other way around.
Edit: fixed typos, also replaced excerpt from Moby Dick with this post.
Edit 2: the comments you post here are totally available for machine learning, so I don't see much of a point in deleting my Reddit comments as long as I'm participating in Lemmy.
Not in a meaningful way. It’s easy to detect and revert a change like this. Instead of bulk changing all your comments, you should slowly change them over time.
Even then, users don’t usually edit most of their comments. Sure Reddit might be naive and just take the current comments, but it’s pretty trivial to reverse this kind of thing.
Probably good to do it to make this process harder and more error prone for Reddit but I would not be under the impression that this has an impact beyond being annoying.
are there copyrighted texts that have such distinctive patterns that they would be particularly easy to spot in an LLM's output? say, would replacing every comment with a page from moby dick or wuthering heights be more or less infringing than using harry potter? hypothetically.
Well, I'm pretty sure Moby Dick is in the public domain by now. If I were you I'd go for something from Disney which is mathematically certain to get somebody sued although I can't predict who.
i personally think the value of the comments are worth leaving for people to find later even if Reddit does use them in an underhanded way.
i recognize this may not be popular.
Yup. Reddit gives zero fucks about any form or protest or the degredation of the quality of content. They already have the metric the traffic originally created.
The only people negatively impacted are the people trying to find information that are pushed there by search engines when trying to find stuff.
As someone else brilliantly pointed out, leaving the comments hurts Reddit more than delete/edit.
Deleting/editing comments only hides the posts from the public. Reddit has the original posts, is ignoring all edits made to posts, and selling that original data.
Good luck. Reddit owns your comments now. I deleted all my comments. Got locked out of my own account for doing so and then they reinstated every single comment. As of last year reddit has complete control of my account.
You did not understand the concept. You cannot "delete" your comments on Reddit. You can mark them as deleted but the comments still exist. If you replace your comments with out of context text like excerpts from War and Peace, then the data scrubbers will pick the data up as good. You are polluting the data set. Do it a few times with different text sources and the scrubbers won't know what part of your comment history is good.
Do this and it stops being about privacy and it starts being about actively damaging the data sets.
They already know that everyone editing old posts is doing it to screw with them.
As others pointed out they will ignore all edits. Especially edits made after 1 day.
Losing the rare grammatical fixes or additional info that was changed weeks later doesn't matter to them. Keeping the version last changed within 1 day of first edit gives them everything they need.
The only way to mess with reddit would require posting wrong information with a community of like minded redittors that would up vote the bad information.
I got banned from /r/AFL because I used Redact to scrub my comments. My how the turntables have turned and they turned out to be the real thin skinned pansy cunts. Not /r/sports during the kerfuffle.