Reddit keeps undeleting my account and posts. Is there anything I can do as an American Citizen?
This is pissing me off to no end. I went on reddit and signed in out of habbit as I have a couple times already and before my account was gone and it wouldnt let me sign in.
Now I did it again and realized that my account actually was undeleted and allowed me to login AND all the posts that I overwrited and deleted with Power Delete Suite where back. I am so pissed right now.
I think people may need to wait. Here's what I've read and seen myself so far:
You can only edit/delete so many comments as it seems reddit only indexes the last 1000. After editing/deleting everything you can, you can see you still have unedited/undeleted comments by searching your username like: site:reddit.com "usernameHere". I saw plenty of comments going back years (I have a 14yr old account) that I wasn't able to touch.
The strategy seems to be to be requesting your data from reddit and then use the comment ids contained in that export to target them for edits/deletes via the API, assuming it's still usable for small scripts like the ones we want to use.
We're tracking our requested/received dates in this thread if you're interested in adding yours to the list.
The lack of indexing and privacy status of the subs likely contributes - but it's also API rate limiting for many of the automated tools like Power Delete Suite.
It will appear that your comments are gone, but the limiter prevents activity from being permanently written over X calls per minute.
I'm using PRAW/python and app credentials I made just for me and PRAW seems to have some good rate limit logic built in.
I also tried Power Delete Suite which seemed to work very quickly and that caused me to worry that I was running afoul of rate limits. My own python script utilizing PRAW works much more slowly but IMO that's a good thing.
I'm hoping that once I have a nice list of comment ids I can hit them all via my script/PRAW, however long it takes.
j0be, the dev for PDS, was informed about the rate limit issue ~2 years ago. I think they recently updated the script to open the discussion page on reddit about it, but there is no limit logic currently.
My personal experience is that using PDS requires multiple attempts - however, the tool is working until it surpasses the call limit.
I just want to point out that if you use one of those comment deleter apps (powersuite, shreddit etc) they cannot delete comments from private subs as they are hidden. So if you tried deleting your stuff while subs are marked private those comments will not be deleted and will reappear on your profile once the sub(s) go back to normal mode. (at the time I'm writing this, there's still 3600 subs currently dark according to https://reddark.untone.uk/ so if you commented in any one of them marked private you'll have to wait for them to come back to public mode to erase them.)
Also, when they do come back they won't always show up normally in your profile. I've had to flip between hot/new/controversial a few times to see them all as they pop back up.
I want to point out that while this may be true, I edited, then deleted mine before the subs started going private and when I checked with google, my comments and posts were showing [deleted] when I googled on them and clicked on them until yesterday. Now they are back. Reddit is restoring deleted comments and posts.
Oh it wouldn't surprise me at all if reddit is pulling stunts like that as well, (especially considering who's running things there and their history with editing comments) but on my main account there I noticed over 160 comments appeared from subs that were participating in the blackout after I thought I had wiped everything.
So far I haven't deleted my account so that I can check back in every couple of days to catch any stray messages/posts that had been missed by the subs being private, and had to delete a good number of them since as the subs slowly come back. It looks like I'm going to have to wait a bit longer yet to ensure everything's gone before I axe that account.
I wonder if these undeletions are just the Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) taking time to sync up?
So you login to one Reddit instance and delete/modify all your posts. This will take time to trickle down to all the other servers in the network. When you next login you are logging into a different reddit instance that has not yet synced up all the changes you made.
For example where I am there are four reddit servers when I check the DNS for reddit.com
;; ANSWER SECTION:
reddit.com. 92 IN A 151.101.129.140
reddit.com. 92 IN A 151.101.1.140
reddit.com. 92 IN A 151.101.65.140
reddit.com. 92 IN A 151.101.193.140
Just a theory that might explain what people are seeing. That said with the behaviour of reddit admins over the last few weeks I wouldn't put it past them to be undeleting though.
As a US citizen you might not have any recourse. Any EU (+UK) citizens however have the right to be forgotten and when notified, Reddit would have to delete all info on you whilst giving you a copy of it. Failure to do so is illegal. However they could just end up keeping the posts (as long as they don't have any identifiable information) but just remove the user name after forgetting about you. That can be tricky so most compliant sites and services will just fully delete to make sure.
Most of the time its not only the karma that makes it valuable, but more importantly the age. Older accounts are worth more because they look less like advertising bots
Handing over credentials to a potential bad actor is absolutely a valid concern.. unless you didn't verify email and have no interest in using the account again.
In that case it becomes an effective means of protest. ;)
are you sure those subs weren't restricted/private during the time of deletion/editing?
seems some of my edited/deleted comments still show the original text, but I also got some messages from Reddit, that I can't edit this comment, because the sub is private/restricted at the moment
On the one hand CDNs not updating would explain it. On the other? Given how twitter tried 'not-banning' people to keep numbers inflated but muzzle dissent? A little paranoia is warrented.
I have a feeling they're going to undelete any activity within the past or next few weeks. I personally am leaving Reddit alone for now. In another two or three weeks (months?), I plan to go in and delete all my old posts slowly over time (or replace with some statement about moving to kbin social).
I'll likely write a manual automated script to parse through and overwrite over a decade's worth of comments/postings to ensure it's erased/gone.
But for now I've blocked the reddit domains from my router so I don't accidentally visit the site and ensure they see zero traffic from my IP address
I just tried doing that with power delete suite but I didnt have it remove the comments just edited them with this "I deleted my reddit account and all my comments and posts but reddit has decided to undelete my account and comments so I have decided to let people know. Fuck this stupid site"
I would recommend people do something similar as deleting your account and posts doesnt seem to help.
I deleted my comments and edited them but they keep coming back. I have notified the authorities in my country. No idea if anything will come of it though.
I think it can if you use power delete suite to edit all your comments but dont delete them. I'm hoping it trips up the detection and I would recommend people do the same
Yes, overwriting with gibberish is better than deleting, especially since reddit has backups and I've seen a few people saying their stuff was restored.
Apps unfortunately have limits in how many posts/comments they can fetch, but overwriting some is better than nothing I guess.
Yeah, it seems if you run power delete suite a few times it covers them all, I had it edit about 4000 comments with "I deleted my reddit account and all my comments and posts but reddit has decided to undelete my account and comments so I have decided to let people know. Fuck this stupid site"
I tried to use power delete to download my stuff, but it always truncated data, I guess I was too much active on reddit lol, I also tried going one sub at a time but it was too much hassle, so I sent a GDPR request, much easier.
Deleting now won't work I think, reddit is monitoring very closely what people are doing, they're trying to limit the damage as much as possible.
Always check up with local data protection authorities, and if those dont properly handle your request either you can take legal action against either. As a citizen of the EU it is your right to do so.
One can only hope that reddit will be hit by a billion dollar fine from the EU lol
Loved the place but it's gone to shit and now they want to ubermonetize it. It was never run like a business and now they complain that it's not making money like a business should. Fuck em
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