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The ability for users to hide their post history on Reddit has made the platform worse by enabling bots and scammers to operate more effectively. This feature hinders the identification of inauthentic accounts and empowers malicious actors, outweighing any potential benefits for genuine users.
Hello! This is a simple argument. Reddit added an ability to hide post history in the last few months. I'm not discussing how it came about (but that was a funny story, and props to the Mod council who opposed it but were just ignored.) One of the best uses for the post history was to find bot accounts and people pretending to be from places they are not. This is akin to seeing locations being taken away from Twitter. I can't find any benefit to it for actual users except maybe now people don't have to make a second porn account. The only other thing I could imagine is to avoid being stalked for those more open about sharing personal info. But overall, this has helped bots stay hidden, and empowered scammers. I think the bots are the primary net negative and they outweigh the positives I imagined. How to change my view: I'm open to outside of the box arguments, but anything that can show it was a net positive for the site will do! I do think bot activity is substantial, so maybe disproving that somehow would also do it as I think that's who is most helped by this change. 10 hours later edit: Thanks folks for the riveting conversation. I handed out 4 deltas (one didn't meet the mod smell test, but I actually love this mod team for how fair they are and accept I probably shouldn't have given it.) Mad props to the mod team of this subreddit for keeping this place fantastic. I think the unsatisfactory conclusion I have come to is there are people who have benefitted from it, but very few people tried to argue it's a net positive with any attempt at balancing my concerns vs their own. I think that's mostly because we can only work from our experiences and how we used post history and had it used against us. The deltas were because I realized my view is subjective, and while I still think it's a major L to lose post history on the whole, many of you have shared your troubles and I have no means to quantify my concerns vs yours. In retrospect, I think I should have approached it differently, about how it changes the nature of Reddit, but that wasn't my original approach nor what you all responded to. I thank you all for taking the time to respond because it helped me refine my thoughts and shared with the community some of the less than stellar experiences you've had. I tried to answer as many of you as I can, and I apologize to those I missed, but I'm signing out on this one.