TL;DR: even if your delete script confirms a full wipe and your Reddit profile page shows zero comment, there may still be comments left over (that you can find through a search engine and delete manually on Reddit).
Weeks ago, I used redact.dev to delete all my Reddit comments (thousands of them over 10+ years). Redact.dev confirmed a full wipe, and my Profile > Comments page on Reddit confirmed I had no comment left.
Yet, as of today, Google still returns dozens of results for “$myredditusername site:reddit.com”. It’s not just Google’s crawler lagging; when I follow those links, those comments are still visible on the Reddit website, under my username, where I have the ability to manually delete them.
Thankfully, I hadn’t yet nuked my account, because I knew of other users whose deleted comments got reinstated (although that was thought to be caused by the deletion script exceeding the API rate limit; supposedly a different case, as those missed comments would still show in the Profile page).
spez: edited for clarity.
Don’t understand why people are surprised that a private company would like to hold on to your data and keep it active no matter what you want or think or do. It’s their system, they can do whatever they want with it regardless of what you want. This isn’t about morals, it’s just business.
I have four or five accounts on Reddit … I’m not sure because I haven’t logged to one or two of them in years.
I’m just abandoning the accounts … I got off the site about a month and a half ago and I haven’t used my accounts since … and it will stay that way. I won’t be creating any more activity with that dumb site … anything you do there is just adding to their monetization of your activity … the best thing to do is to do nothing … absolutely nothing.
Don’t understand why people are surprised that a private company would like to hold on to your data and keep it active no matter what you want or think or do.
Maybe because reddit literally says they will allow you to change this on their privacy policy?
https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy
Your Rights and Choices
Accessing and Changing Your Information
You can access your information and change or correct certain information through the Services.anything you do there is just adding to their monetization of your activity … the best thing to do is to do nothing
Well, saving a copy of your content, overwriting it, and then deleting it - I don’t see how this leads to additional monetization. It’s actually better than doing nothing because it prevents further monetization.
Ditto with deleting of accounts (as opposed to deletion of content) vs abandoning of accounts. The latter means that reddit can inflate their number of accounts in some ways, etc.
Your comment made me rethink about what to do with me Reddit accounts … I’ve taken the past two days to auto delete all my comments, posts and submissions, deactivate all my mod accounts, unsubscribe from all the subs I followed … and in a day or two, I’ll complete delete the accounts.
I know Reddit will still hold onto pieces of my account everywhere … but at least they’ll have a harder time justifying it all.
I’m trying to get banned in the hope everything is deleted then. Any tips for getting banned without any hate speech or anything illegal?
I dont think getting banned will remove posts and comments from your history that haven’t been flagged as rule-breaking. All that will happen is that your banworthy comment will get deleted and you’ll lose access to your account, which is the worst outcome because then you can no longer manually delete your history.
I believe that “0 comments” you can see is limited to about 1000. There’s a list of your comments that are viewable by your profile page, and that only caches the first 1000 in any category (top, new, controversial, etc).
Interesting - do you have more details about that? I would expect the “top 1K” query to show the leftovers, which would have become the next most top/controversial/etc after the original top 1K got nuked.
Okay, I’m not sure where it originated, but here’s a link to a relevant comment. I read it in a post about deleting Reddit comments when I first started exploring the fediverse, and I’m not sure I can find it but iirc, a Reddit admin confirmed that when you check your posts, it only shows the top 1000 and comments are only pushed off this list for “new” additions, and the list is not repopulated when you delete things. Therefore, if you delete all your comments, then check the list, it will show none (or if you delete 100 comments, it will show only 900, etc). Something about how these lists are populated in Reddit’s system. It is also relevant that some of the Reddit delete programs out there use this list and so will never delete all your comments.
I will keep looking for the original post tho.
Close.
Each of Reddit’s listings (top submissions, recent comments, etc.) is generated from a database index. Those indexes are limited to 1000 entries, by dropping older ones as new ones arrive, and they don’t re-index for deletions.
That means that once a listing goes over 1000 items, the oldest items can no longer be found through it. The messages are still in the database somewhere, but can only be reached from some other index (different sorting order) or a search or a direct link.
So, the messages are not being deleted and then restored; they were never deleted in the first place, because the deletion tools have no way to find them.
This is why a formal data deletion request is often more effective than a tool.
Thank you for the clarification!
And I think if you get your GDPR data request from Reddit, you can get the direct links and that allows some of the comment deletion/editing tools to do their full job, but I’m not sure on the full details on that.
@anon Reddit is known for bringing deleted comments back, without your consent. That’s especially bad for people who also delete the account, because they have no control anymore (I mean even less). Pretty scummy. More people should be aware of this issue.
It looks like that’s the case. I found a comment that was mine from 10 months ago. It looks as if Reddit recovered my deleted comments after I deleted my account.
At this point, I don’t care. I left all that behind.
Is it possible the sub was private when you deleted the comments? This and known, since-fixed issues with PowerDeleteSuite explain nearly all of the “undeleted” comments I’ve looked into in-depth.
I used redact.dev and confirmed on reddit.com that all my comments were deleted well before the blackouts.
I’m not familiar with redact.dev and can’t comment on its accuracy, but your comments from earlier in this thread make it seem like you only found out about how the limitations of reddit’s profile page work about 11 hours ago. They probably weren’t deleted to begin with.
That’s right, they were most likely never deleted in the first place, despite Reddit’s indication to the contrary.
Can you show this indication? Otherwise, this looks like a pretty clearcut case of user error.
