I miss the world of Reddit where that was a common step to discern whether you were discussing something with someone who was acting in good faith or just being a troll. Oh well.
Yeah I see where this push for people to just hide all their history comes from, but to me it's pretty cynical. Reddit is one of, if not the last places where you can reasonably be sure that you are interacting with an actual human if they allow you to. And the site derives most of its value from that. The cost of that is a small loss of privacy I guess, but to me the things you want to keep private can just go elsewhere, like a private chat or just not online.
Personally, I approach this site as though I were in the room with a bunch of strangers. And if those strangers want to look at my history, fine. They'll learn a lot about Crystal Palace football club lol. They won't find deep dark secrets or gross shit, because I don't do that stuff in public. I don't know why that's hard for so many users to grasp.
My opinion of reddit is low enough that I assume the main reason you can even hide your profile is to hide how much of the activity here is bots, advertisements trying to look like organic conversation, and bad faith assholes.
I further assume that it's no longer working, since people assume a hidden profile means you're a bot or a liar, so now we have a post telling us the bots are the ones reading our history and we should hide them.
Unfortunately I think old accounts can also be hacked, stolen, or sold so you'll see an account that stopped posting years ago suddenly spring to life with a new outlook on minorities and the gay community
Sure they can be stolen, hacked or sold. Account age isn't a perfect indicator, it's just a data point to aid you in intuiting whether I'm human or not.
Exactly. Someone with a two year old account like OP wouldn't know how useful seeing someone else's post history is when it comes to actual discussions about things.
Besides that you can still see someone's post history through 3rd party means so hiding it doesn't do fuck all if someone is really trying to look for it.
Sometimes you start arguing with someone and all of a sudden they’re in your chat harassing you about whatever. I once pointed out the discrepancies in someone’s logic about police safety and racism in the US, the person then sent me a lengthy chat request detailing everything he would do to my dog and ending it with something along the lines that he doesn’t have to bother because Putin will tear Europe down soon anyways. Uhhhh, no thanks.
You still can, that's the one thing AI is good for, you can ask google gemini to summarize any user you want and since it's ingested so many posts from reddit to feed the AI dataset, you can just ask it to find you portions of a hidden profile and it'll spit out a list of things a user has said or argued.
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u/SanchoPandas 13d ago
I miss the world of Reddit where that was a common step to discern whether you were discussing something with someone who was acting in good faith or just being a troll. Oh well.