1y ago

Delete Reddit history

Hello Lemmy!

How do you recommend dealing with your old reddit account/ posts? Should I delete my old posts or just leave them there? Or maybe replace everything with the same text?

I heard that reddit might be restoring deleted posts. Would editing the post and then deleting it or just editing it be the better alternative to just deleting it?

I've seen the post that recommends doing all that BEFORE the API shutdown but now it's after so I figured maybe something had changed about the tactics?

How did you go about it?

28 comments

Editing everything to jibberish has a negative impact on Reddit and Google searches of Reddit. It's better than deleting since it still takes up database space:
Something like DROP_TABLE ALL;
- Thanks for the hint. What does
  DROP_TABLE ALL
  mean?
  Also would you say random text that doesn't make sense is better or just copy pasting a paragraph from somewhere? Or just a one liner like: "Moved to Lemmy."?
  
  I would not make it too easy to filter out the edited comments. So replacing all with the same paragraph may not be the best idea. Some variation apears to be the key to me.
  That said, I like the idea of pointing to Lemmy.
  
  It is kind of a joke.
  https://xkcd.com/327
  It is SQL command and implies to delete or drop a database table
  
  It's an SQL command to delete the database named All. A lil programmer humor.
  Either is good but I personally want to use maximum allowed characters and maybe Shakespeare. The more bot-like and irrelevant the better
  
  Encode a link to lemmy in base64 and put that as your edit.
  Would have done it myself if I'd have thought of that before.

From what I understand deleted comments can and are being restored by mods. You’re better off editing your comments and either leaving them with gibberish or whatever, or editing them and then deleting them. If Reddit restore them it will only be able to restore the latest edit, so they’d just be restoring gibberish.
Your original posts will probably still be around somewhere on an archive site, but Reddit can’t make money from those sites so it doesn’t help them.

Just edited and deleted mine. Sad to see 10 years of history go, and I'd forgotten a lot of the stuff. But had to happen, Reddit does not own me

How do you mass edit all of your comments and posts?
- I used Redact.app, but this was before the api changes. I’m curious how these apps work now, if at all
  
  I tried this before the changes and it worked great, I got to the point of clicking a button to edit and delete, but figured I’d wait. On July 1 I couldn’t get it to work, would let me log into Reddit to give permissions but would take me directly (and only) to Reddit chat, which I’ve never used. Haven’t tried it since then, hopefully it’s fixed, or not sure what happened there.
- Good question. No way I could edit or delete decades of comments and posts

Power Delete Suite, all the way
Just go here
Drag the button to your toolbar to create a shortcut
Go to your profile page on Reddit
Press the shortcut button you created on the toolbar
Select options*
Start deleting!
strongly recommend creating a "goodbye" message to edit your posts to before deleting. This makes it extremely difficult for Reddit to restore your data to what it was prior to deleting it.
- Thanks man. I was looking for this.
- Seems like PDS is missing a lot of my comment (edits). Should I just keep running it or is Reddit blocking the edits?
  
  Not sure. It got ever single one of mine and there were thousands.
  Keep in mind that if you edit any top of a post, some subreddits may have a bot that will reply to it if it contained anything that might trigger an automatic rule. For example, if you wanted to make your last message "Fuck /u/spez" on all your posts, the auto bot on some of the subs might disallow you from doing that. Ask me how i know 😏

I deleted mine and occasionally log in to delete stuff from subreddits that have returned. I no longer get PMs from posts made years ago and that’s been nice.

Personally, I've been editing and deleting manually. It's not easy, but in the end, the only things left on my account will be links to Lemmy instances and proof of what a shit head spez is, so it's worth it.

personally i just deleted my whole account but i'm not sure whether that also deleted my comments and posts themselves.
- It does not.

28 comments