I just found out that not all of my Reddit comments had been deleted despite my profile page showing otherwise.

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.

cassetti,

I don't trust those snakes. I'm working on code to use reddit's website and edit comments one at a time (one per minute so they don't think it's bot activity) and I'm going to deploy the code a month or two from now after the API is gone - because I want them to think they've "won" before I over-write and then erase a decade's worth of content

elboyoloco,

Is this something you would be able to share with others when it’s finished. Or put it on Github and people can make suggestions or changes?

cassetti,

So I'm not a traditional programmer - I don't use a lot of the common software and such. I have a lot of prior experience using AutoItScript automated software so I'll probably use that to mimic keystrokes and clicks on my computer screen once I have programmed exact positions for things - it'll likely be a very specific set of code for my computer.

But I may create an account on github and share if there's enough interest lol

TimeSquirrel,
TimeSquirrel avatar

So it scrapes the page manually? I was thinking of writing a small python program myself to do that.

cassetti,

More simple than that - I'll likely use AutoItScript for windows - literally automate clicking links or simulating keystrokes (like the tab key) until it reaches the desired link then clicking the edit function, revising text, tab to the save button, saving change, and repeat over and over.

It's crude and inefficient, but I have over twenty years experience using the code for various small tasks so I'm sure I'll get the job done.

Just not sure when I want to start - I feel like they are still playing tricks un-deleting content and such for people using automated API code. So for now I've simply blocked reddit at the router level for another month or two before I go back and start writing my code to automate the deletion of 10+ years worth of content.

SpaceCadet2000,
SpaceCadet2000 avatar

This is correct, most of those scripts can only delete 1000 comments from new/top/controversial.

The method to delete all your comments is as follows:

  1. Do a GDPR request for a copy of your data using: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request. Wait until you get the zip file, then extract it somewhere.

  2. Download the free utility shreddit from https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit and point it to the directory where you extracted your GDPR data using the --gdpr-export-dir flag.

anon,
anon avatar

This is very good to know, thank you.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

FYI for those who are worried that they aren't covered by a law like the GDPR/CCPA (or even PIPEDA/LGPD/CPA/VCDPA) and that reddit might not give it to them, I came up with a way to get a similar list (bypassing the limits) here, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

Yep, I covered this previously, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/47320/PSA-If-you-have-more-than-1000-posts-more-than

Along with a method to deal with this, even if you don't think you can get your GDPR archive, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the

I never got a chance to follow up with https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/107907/POLL-Should-we-sticky-some-PSA-We-need-to-warn but I think I should soon.

TheShitAbyss,

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?

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

I was permabanned but everything was still there, nothing was deleted. I still had to use a combo of a script to delete things plus manual deletion.

anon,
anon avatar

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.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

Well, when I was permabanned, I could still create an API key and run a script like github shreddit to wipe my account out. I never lost access to my account, I just couldn't add new posts/comments or send messages to anyone.

ininewcrow,
@ininewcrow@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

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.

ininewcrow,
@ininewcrow@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

RoboRay,
RoboRay avatar

Reddit is broken. It's not unusual for some of your comments to get disconnected from your account profile and not show up there anymore.

They still belong to your account so you can delete them from the actual thread... Just not from your profile.

It's been this way for years... Just most people don't notice because they don't try to clear out their entire history.

DarkThoughts,

Or when replies to a now removed comment ended up as top level comment, making reading the comments sometimes super confusing. Reddit's backend is probably nothing but spaghetti code. Hence why the redesign & mobile app are both also such piles of garbage. It would likely need a complete rewrite, but they probably don't have any sort of way to do that and maintain all the old legacy content. That's also a good reason to go closed source, especially if you want to become a traded company. Investors are probably not having the hots for garbage code that everyone can look at & criticize.

BlueKey,
BlueKey avatar

How long did you wait between the deletion and your Google search?
Maybe the Databases still have to reach consistency.

anon,
anon avatar

Weeks. But it’s not just Google returning obsolete results - when I follow the links, the comments are still there, on the Reddit website, under my username. I’ve clarified my post accordingly.

BlueKey,
BlueKey avatar

I saw your clarification that the comments persited on reddit.com. My thought was maybe the part of the DB which manages the comments of the posts was lacking behind.
But after weeks this should not be the case, so I take my comment back.

eleitl,

My data takeout request arrived yesterday, so next I’ll be filing a GDPR request which I will use to rewrite my history before deleting it and then filing another GDPR request which then better be empty.

thingsiplay,
thingsiplay avatar

@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.

Madison_rogue,
Madison_rogue avatar

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.

quirzle,
quirzle avatar

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.

Madison_rogue,
Madison_rogue avatar

No, the sub wasn't private. They participated only for the two day blackout.

anon,
anon avatar

I used redact.dev and confirmed on reddit.com that all my comments were deleted well before the blackouts.

quirzle,
quirzle avatar

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.

anon,
anon avatar

That’s right, they were most likely never deleted in the first place, despite Reddit’s indication to the contrary.

quirzle, (edited )
quirzle avatar

Can you show this indication? Otherwise, this looks like a pretty clearcut case of user error.

anon,
anon avatar

I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. Go to reddit.com, click on your profile page, then on Comments. This will show you a list of your comments. If that list is empty, and it wasn’t prior to you deleting all your comments with an API tool like redact.dev, you can reasonably conclude that all your comments are gone. Yet it’s not the case.

I can show you a screenshot of the blank Comments page, but I’m not sure what it would add.

quirzle,
quirzle avatar

This comment (which you've replied to, so ostensibly have already seen) does a good job of articulating how this only shows the top thousand comments at a time and doesn't update as you delete them.

Depending on which tool you deleted with, it may or may not have done a decent job of working around this reddit limitation to actually delete them all.

So it's not necessarily pretty straightforward, especially if you commented a lot.

anon,
anon avatar

I had indeed read and understood the earlier comment that you linked.

I just got confused by your “user error” suggestion, because I don’t see how this qualifies as one.

First, the Reddit API is broken, because the select query sent by the deletion tool receives less than a full set (as if there was an implied LIMIT clause on the server side). This leads the deletion tool to erroneously announce it has processed all comments.

Two, the Reddit UX is broken, because the profile’s Comments page incorrectly returns an empty set due to a silent design limitation (as described in the linked comment).

There is literally no mechanism to find leftover comments through either the Reddit API or UX, because both are broken. The only workaround is to use a search engine that had indexed those leftover comments.

That’s the whole point of my original post, and I don’t see where the “user error” may come in.

quirzle,
quirzle avatar

I just got confused by your “user error” suggestion, because I don’t see how this qualifies as one.

Because you're both claiming to understand the failing of reddit's UI and claiming the same UI as a reliable indicator of all comments getting deleted. Rather, it seems some comments were likely missed because of the shitty UI. Relying on reddit's UI for this is the specific user error to which I was referring. I hope that's clearer.

First, the Reddit API is broken, because the select query sent by the deletion tool receives less than a full set (as if there was an implied LIMIT clause on the server side). This leads the deletion tool to erroneously announce it has processed all comments.

I don't see anywhere that goes into what redact.dev does behind the scenes (closed source on something like this is a huge red flag to me, but more relevant here is that there's no indication whether it was using an app-specific api key or just using a hidden browser under the hood), though I do see where the reddit service page states:

Reddit stores posts in comments in a weird way. If you’re trying to delete thousands at once, we may not be able to find all of them.

You also mentioned that's how you confirmed all your comments were deleted. One could argue using a tool that admits it can't see all your comments to confirm whether your comments are all deleted could be considered an error as well.

There is literally no mechanism to find leftover comments...

Best approach I've seen that's still standing for a post-API reddit is using the GDPR request as input for one of the tools using it, so it's not relying on the janky UI.

anon,
anon avatar

Because you're both claiming to understand the failing of reddit's UI and claiming the same UI as a reliable indicator of all comments getting deleted. Rather, it seems some comments were likely missed because of the shitty UI. Relying on reddit's UI for this is the specific user error to which I was referring. I hope that's clearer.

Thanks for clarifying. I understand the failing of Reddit’s UI from reading about it in the replies here. I didn’t know about it when I first posted, so there is no contradiction there. I also had no reason then to believe that either the redact tool (which reported deleting all comments) nor the Reddit UX (which reported no comment left) were inaccurate in their reporting.

Had either displayed wording similar to that service page you linked to, I would agree with you that it would have been user error to ignore it.

Barring that, I think it’s a stretch to claim user error when an obscure technical limitation of Reddit makes its UX misleading in a non-obvious way.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

Hands down this is the right answer.

Just FYI someone else used redact.dev in the past and found that comments got missed too, see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/46805/Strange-phenomenon-while-deleting-my-comments

Also, while GDPR archive + github reddit works out of the box, if for some reason you don't want to wait that long or are skeptical that reddit will get back to you (perhaps you live in a place that has no GDPR/CCPA), then there is a backup method to get around this limit, using the pushshift archives available via torrent.

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the

ndguardian,

One thing I’ll mention is to try actually clicking into a post if you see it on a Google search. Web indexing systems like Google may take time before they drop old links. If it’s still there when you’ve clicked into it, there’s still more to clean up.

anon, (edited )
anon avatar

Yes, it’s not just just the search engine’s web crawler lagging behind in updating its Reddit index. Following the links takes me to the actual comment, on Reddit, under my username. There are dozens of them, some very old, some recent. Yet the Reddit Profile > Comments page shows I have none left. So even Reddit is not internally consistent.

skillissuer,

this gets worse when you compare it with your GDPR request

Pandantic,
Pandantic avatar

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).

anon,
anon avatar

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.

Pandantic,
Pandantic avatar

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.

anon,
anon avatar

Thank you. I’m boosting your reply as I hadn’t heard of this behavior before (as I’m sure many others) and it’s the most plausible explanation for what’s going here, i.e., not malicious intent from Reddit but rather sloppy design of the profile’s comments feed and how it pulls data.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

yeah, i've been trying to get the word out for ages, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/47320/PSA-If-you-have-more-than-1000-posts-more-than

ono, (edited )

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.

ColdCreasent,

But they have refused in the past to comply with a formal deletion request. They say, you may delete your account, but if you want your comments/submissions deleted, then you will have to do all of them yourself. My source is Louise Rossman on YouTube talking about how Reddit is willing to do illegal things to stop people leaving their platform.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

For the path of least resistance, getting the copy of the archive and then using a tool like github shreddit to delete works 100% without needing to do anything beyond setting up an API key manually.

To refuse to comply with a formal deletion request (where reddit does the deleting instead of you (even via a tool like shreddit)) is illegal, and reddit should lose in the end, but it will take some years go to through the courts and such.

ColdCreasent,

I appreciate the input of a link/name of the GitHub that can delete comments. I agree they should lose in the end for refusing to delete all content and it’s just a matter of getting them there.

Also, anyone still planning to delete their comments and then delete their account: make sure your comments are gone and then wait a few weeks to make sure the comments stay gone.

Pandantic,
Pandantic avatar

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.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

Correct, github shreddit for example can do this, it has builtin support for checking the GDPR archive and finding comments and posts to delete/overwrite that way.

Vilian,

it’s look like the google cached your comments, just waits a few days and search your username again

anon, (edited )
anon avatar

It’s not just the search results, it’s the actual comments, on the Reddit website itself, still visible under my username. Despite redact.dev reporting a complete wipe weeks ago, and the Reddit profile > comments page returning zero result.

I only used Google to do a sanity check weeks after the deletion, and found all those leftovers that even Reddit doesn’t report to me as being still there.

Aloomineum,

I deleted my comments last week but its like you say, they still show up in the threads on reddit.

How do i make sure these comments are properly deleted? Weird thing is the comments showing make it look like i deleted my account, and not the comments, which is not the case. I still have my account, i only deleted my comments and posts.

anon,
anon avatar

Are you still able to log in and delete each comment manually? That’s the only reliable method, unless of course Reddit goes full Satan and actively reverses deletions on purpose.

NightOwl,

Dammit. I’m never going to be able to delete my reddit account if I want be truly sure my comments don’t res back.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

You can try this method, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the

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