Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn't planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I'm not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that's a bit concerning. There's no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail's-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.
This is why I make sure that everything I post is offensive or inflammatory. That way, keeping my comments published is counterproductive for the platform, you dumb piece of shit.
The API-based deletion tools usually have to be tuned to delete posts slowly enough to not trigger Reddit's abuse detection. Otherwise, they'll automatically undo bulk changes like that.
There's no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail's-pace reddit UI
This is, unfortunately, the only way to guarantee that your posts stay deleted. My account was 15 years old. I still log in every few weeks or so to go manually delete more comments. It'll be a while.
I’ve replaced all of my Reddit comments for the past year with AI generated nonsense. It seems to have stuck. I plan on going through all of my past comments but will spread it out over time so that it’s harder to restore.
IMO the key is making a post that writes gibberish but that is good enough to suck a user in to read it for a few seconds before they realize it is BS. That kills the user experience and poisons the site.
Any basic level competency backend team has change history on comments. Crack whatever jokes you like about Reddit but they at least have "basic level competency"
It's trivial for them to build some filters to detect mass changes and just fuckin roll them back.
If you post ANYTHING on ANY server you don't own: it's out there. For ever.
Are you sure it was previously deleted stuff? I thought the same thing had happened to me but it was due to subreddits being private at the time of deletion then later coming out of private (some weeks or months later) preventing those then privated posts/comments from being deleted. I think running another automated tool again should do the trick at this point.
Are you a resident of the EU? If so, I believe you have the legal right to demand that reddit delete all of your data and user content, and by law they must comply.
If you are a US citizen, I believe you have very little recourse in forcing them to delete your data, unless you are a resident of California or Virginia.
I had a similar issue. I had probably two million comment karma spread across about a dozen accounts. My first account was quickly auto-banned from several subreddits as soon as I started editing old comments. Those pro-spez mods had seen what people were doing during the exodus, and set the automod to ban those who tried.
Then I did the same with my second, third, fourth, etc accounts. All of those were immediately site banned for ban evasion, because I was interacting with subs my first account had just been banned in. So none of the edits on those later accounts were pushed through.
Reddit later un-banned those accounts, and all of my old comments were visible again. Likely to make the old comments show up.
Every time this gets brought up, I go back to a thread where my most popular comment was (since I no longer have an account to check back on and it's the only one I know for sure I can find). To this day, it luckily still remains deleted. If it does get restored, I wonder if it becomes the original comment or the generic [deleted in protest of the Reddit API change] or whatever I set them to be edited to before deletion.
Just wait till you hear how Lemmy "deletes" things. Illegal revenge and child porn, genocidal hate speech, everything is stored forever and in some apps, not even obscured.
On a plus side, maybe, if you choose to delete your comments and posts again, albeit slowly, would be to copy/paste the really useful shit to Lemmy. I say this because one unintended (or not) consequence of these actions is that posts from years ago, explaining the solution to a problem that still pops up now and then, doesn't have the solution most of the time.
I don't disagree with the sentiment or actions at all, it just sucks when you find someone having the same issue you are, only to learn it's on reddit and the solution to said problem was deleted.
It's one of the reasons I never deleted my account there every time my stuff pops back up I trounce it down again.
Speaking of which, I just checked and YEAH, not everything I ever posted is back, not even all the highest rated stuff, but a lot has come back and deleting more than a few at a time starts throwing errors :)
I just checked and Reddit did the same with my account. I spent hours editing and ultimately deleting my posts and comments, and the Spez Gestapo just undeleted years worth of content. I'm going to go through them again and this time I'll leave the gibberish.
You should delete your account. It can't be used again on Reddit (unless they change their policy). If you're worried about being identified, then it's better to just delete the account anyway than the alternative.
I just only did the first step: replace all I had written with random gibberish. And then I did nothing. Just left it there.
And the gibberish is still there. Mission accomplished.
One of the goals of this method was to feed KI with Nonsense. Obviously I wasn’t the only person who did so. And it looks like it has worked.
Lol, a couple times I commented whenever this came up that it was probably pointless deleting like this with the random words and what not because reddit was likely doing some form of versioning or backups of at least the text based content. Especially since said content was/is under inflated executive value because "AI"
I got downvoted routinely because "ThAT WoULd Be Too ExPeNsiVe anD CoMpLiCatED, no WaY thEY dOiN tHaT"...if what you say is true with the true random words and everything, then I was right and they're doing exactly what I thought they'd do lol
I find it very funny to think of how aggressively Reddit was banning people, particularly back in 2016. And how algorithmic they got in censoring and shadowbanning certain comments and accounts.
But now that real human interactions are more valuable than gold, they're trying to reverse it all again.
If you live in the EU at least, I’m pretty sure much of this outright evil stuff Reddit is doing is illegal. If you want to delete your account and comments, they have to let you.
This may be a little bit offtopic, but is there any way to archive my comments/posts in an offline file with links to the original thread if I want to see them again before I delethe them?
Just tell them you live in the EU and you want to exercise your right to be forgotten, therefore you want them to delete all the data they have on you permanently. They'll comply, trust me.
Also you can first download all the data they have on you, as required by the GDPR, if you want to backup some of it.
I know there are some databases of all Reddit comments prior to... maybe 2015? I forget. Would be cool to port them into an open source clone that isn't profiting off them, just for the times comments were really useful, like solving a tech issue only a couple people had ever documented.
This just happened to me as well. Deleted all my stuff about a year ago and even happened to check last week and it was still gone. Saw this and went back to check again just now, and it had all been undeleted.
Update: just realized it’s not everything, just everything more than 5 years old
Shit, this made me look at my okd account and sane thing happened.
I wish I was in the EU, I could report them for ignoring my deletion request (I actually also asked for the user to be deleted)
My 15k deleted comments across multiple accounts are still gone. But I used my own Python script and it was about 6 months before the drama started and lots of people were doing it.
Use the plugin to archive and replace posts. After a while do the replace again but stop in the middle.
Repeat as necessary... it makes the posts different but still not valid.
Maybe you should start the long process of manually changing everything to grammatically correct, parseable nonsense, comment by comment. Make it a long term project.
There's an extension that changes your comments to gibberish instead of deleting, seems like they don't restore those as often as the deleted messages, but my guess is that they still use the backups for the AI training
If you're concerned about particular comments or posts linking your Reddit account to your real-world identity, and you know have a pretty good idea what those are, can you just delete or modify those?
I think that there are some other issues here, though.
That will help if you're worried about someone doxxing an account via just casually doing Web searches, maybe.
But people have already archived copies of Reddit's comment and post history. So if you're worried about someone likely to be digging through such a database, this won't help.
And I have no idea whether Reddit actually purges deleted comments internally, or whether they or any partners or future purchasers might have access to deleted text. I haven't looked at their privacy policy, so I don't know what they do.
Was it random gibberish or the same phrase every time? I'm not sure what Reddit is capable of but if you use a copy pasted message then they could easily know which posts to undelete. However, if you replace your posts with random sentences (say pick from a list of 100) they won't know which is real through obfuscation.