I’m fearful of people going redditZero and deleting their years-old accounts, as reddit has become a vast trove of information for a vast number of systems. If I go dark and delete, it won’t be everything. Memes and regular conversations may go, but I’ll be sure to leave every technical response I’ve ever given (or even edit it if I have since learned more precise information). It feels like so many are ready to cut off their nose to spite their face. The community we had was built by us collectively and enriched by the content we shared. I feel like despite reddit literally doing everything wrong, by deleting our collective wisdom, we aren’t hurting reddit as much as we’re hurting our own community of sysadmins.
Please consider that we are facing a Wisdom of the Ancients situation here, and I sure as shit know that I don’t want to be the one on the other end of seeing “deleted”, then “Thanks that worked!” in my future.
Just food for thought.
I initially agreed with you. I’d hate to see all of that communal knowledge lost.
Reading the other replies, I am not so sure. Do they deserve to continue capitalizing on other peoples knowledge? Yes and No. They did supply a service without which that collection would have had to be assembled somewhere else. But I don’t think they should be able to capitalize on it forever.
With the archive team and their efforts, I am less worried about “Wisdom of the Ancients” situation.
I just hope the archives will be easily accessible and searchable, preferably without having to specifically leave the search engine to search them, otherwise the knowledge will still, in practice for most people, be inaccessible.