I might get “cancelled” for this, but hear me out:
If you remove your account bad actors won’t be able to identify you unless they put in the effort. Reddit staff will revert popular comments and posts to the way they were before the Blackout. Mass-scrambling your posts and comments with a “f*ck Spez”, followed by a long chain of "A"s or whatever, annoys people who are just trying to find an answer to something on Reddit, and it doesn’t help anybody except the user’s feelings.
The preservation of information comes above some moral feeling.
Your opinion?
Overwriting your comments erodes Reddit’s long-standing search engine advantage, so I support it.
When Reddit took my Apollo away, it told me I don’t matter. I treated my comment history in kind.
More to the point, I took it off of reddit, but moved it onto the fediverse. Folks who need that advice I wrote many years ago will still be able to find it, they just have to look elsewhere than reddit for it.
On the other hand, it makes spammy articles from content farms the primary resource to find answers.
And either way, not everybody is doing this, so Reddit retains part of its usability, which still exists, and some portion of people will still use Reddit after the API changes.
Or it forces search providers to actually fix their shit rather than relying on our labor.
Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Reddit is a spammy content farm, too.
I didn’t choose any of this. Reddit made the first move. Maybe Steve Huffman should consider second-order consequences.