Sometimes I find old Reddit posts on search engines, and when I look at them the top commenter’s account is deleted. This has happened many times, and I was curious about the general statistics of this.

I made a small analysis of Reddit.

I searched some random words with top posts: “minecraft, people, help, science, google, amazon, funny, colorful.”

I didn’t just choose the top one; I chose 10 old posts and summed up the total users in comments (top posts hierarchically).

data

Results;

total 1,947 users, 451 deleted, 23.1%

btw this is for users who deleted their accounts; maybe there are many more abandoned

this is just a small research I did; the real stats may be higher or lower - I don’t know

So at least in my research, 23% of top commentator Reddit users chose to delete their accounts; some of them also deleted their comments, and some obfuscated their comments (to poison LLMs)

But 23% of top commentors is a really big number. These guys made Reddit the Reddit, but they chose to leave

  • Oyu F'ka@mander.xyz
    8·
    2 days ago

    I’m one of those people! A victim of the zionist trolls that prowl there.

    I was in the 1% top commenters on r/palestine, and out of the blue I am informed I had a lifetime ban for an old comment that I"m still not sure I made…they wouldn’t respond to my messages or even allow me to see the comment, so I eventually gave up, deleted my account, and here I am, lol! (Although I’m mostly on mastodon 🙂).

    Edit: I don’t think my example really accounts for the lost accounts - just a guess, but I think you’ll find that a lot of active redditors left reddit, (about 3-4 years back…maybe more, maybe less…there’s probably a lot of them on here 🤔), in protest about their ‘updating’ of the format, with much more ‘in your face’ advertising, in an attempt to convert it into a social media platform.

    • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      I got told i was upvoting banned content. That was a kick in the pants! Got me off reddit quick.

    • Artwork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I am sorry…
      To support the case, I moved when got shadow-banned and never received any response:
      - https://lemmy.world/post/41927576/21676673

      Yet, Lemmy is sure a place, too… where you may get inhumanly banned just like a biomass, too… For example, relatively recently, I was banned on some Community for literally odd reason, and never got any response from their moderators in 2 private messages I sent regarding it:
      - https://lemmy.world/modlog…

      Image previews

      The ban record (I did absolutely nothing suspicious, I believe, and the account is months old):

      The private messages preview: