Is anyone concerned that by deleting their reddit comments they might be reducing their chances of being able to someday tongue punch Spez in his sweaty fart-box?
Except people like me sometimes are desperate for a solution. Besides, I suspect they are going to shoot themselves in the foot even more with some bad policy.
I don’t really don’t understand the dislike of Reddit. If you don’t want to use it then don’t. Overtime I suspect they will fall into decline
PowerDeleteSuite doesn’t work for me. old.reddit.com/u/me/overview takes me to a login page (even though I’m already signed in) and when I sign in there, the same page just comes back again without the credentials I typed in.
Same thing happens in Firefox and Edge.
I swear it worked last year. Is it now broken or am I just really stupid?
update: turns out PowerDeleteSuite and others can only delete your 1000 most recent comments (a limit set by reddit), but I found something that actually works and does a thorough job. github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
There are step-by-step instructions on the page.
I’m running the program in PowerShell with the GDPR option, and it’s been nicely chugging away for hours now.
I must be an idiot or something because I’ve been trying to figure out how to use shreddit and after an hour of fiddling with things all I can manage is powershell telling me it can’t use “<” or telling me I got the command syntax wrong.
Maybe the directions assume the user has some knowledge of programming stuff, but I sure as heck don’t know it.
Edit: I was an idiot…
Edit 2: it’s working but I have to babysit it. It stops randomly. after 100 posts without gdpr export
It got all my posts, it’s just working for about 2 minutes on my comments before it just stops and I have to re-enter the command.
It’s possible reddit is rate limiting you, or the program loses access to the gdpr folder it’s pulling the links from (antivirus?). You could try running it from a different path or on a different pc.
I ran the .exe from the same “reddit-data” folder that contained the gdpr files just to be safe with folder permissions and stuff.
So I finally managed to figure it out and let the gdpr run for 3 days.
After day 1 I figured out without the gdpr folder, you can only delete a certain amount, 100 I think.
The rate limit is also set to 30/min (sleep 2s between actions) so I managed to get two instances running at once without hitting the limit.
One gdpr deleting from 2010 onward, one with an auto-typer hitting f3+enter ever 2 minutes 21 seconds to delete from 2023 backward.
Took another 2 days but I managed to delete my old profile. Googling will bring up a few archived posts on other websites, and name mentions but no posts, and the random sampling I did showed nothing when I tried checking on the individual comments.
So it took me a bit to figure out, but I managed.
They definitely assume people have a certain level of knowledge of things when doing the documentation, but luckily it’s easy to find information.
Cool, you managed to get it working after all. I never used Power Shell before this either.
It’s ridiculous the average user has to jump through all these hoops just to regain control of their own data.
Hey maybe someday there will be a website that just allows you to delete everything they have on you at any time for any reason with only a few clicks and no input on their side…
They will tell you you have to delete it yourself.
Comments are technically not necessarily covered under GDPR after they are decoupled from your account and they have no knowledge that it contains other personal data. (which they do not have to check by themselves, that would be ridiculous anyways)
So yes, you do need to run PowerDeleteSuite and then delete your account via account settings (which then triggers deletion in accordance of Article 17)
u could also try making small valid changes to detail over time until the posted content is unrecognizable and probably** false.
eg: i drive a red car
i drive a blue car
i drive a blue truck
i dont drive anything
those are all possibly true. but alot of them are incorrect.
That’s a legit evil advice, but not that ridiculous to my taste.
Start with mass find&replacing by a mask ‘not’ to ‘indeed’, delete all n’t, replace ‘and’ with ‘but’.
Take all groups like * and change a content of links in brackets to How to play a cowbell tutorial video.
Remove double line breaks to a single one so it’d all be single-paragraph messages with a failed markdown.
Delete commas and replace dots with question marks.
Change register of letters letters counting the next letter to redo by the next number in the π sequence.
Do a table of all pronouns and replace half of them to Red Pants, half to Blue Pants to keep it political.
And, finally, end every 13th message with a disclaimer Retired 2023, thirteen year daily forums volunteer, Windows MVP 2010-2020.
Congrats, your comments are fucking insane and super harmful. I imagine what a garbage it would be to find a genually helpful of empathetic reply turned into that mess.
But as a lite version of that, first three sentences, would make it confusing enough without be easily recognizable.
A python script hooked up to the openai API could be a fun way to play with this. Just edit the comments with random bs somehow marginally related to the original topic but incorrect.
It’s a real shame though because those old comments are often lifesavers when you’re looking into really niche subjects.
I was thinking about manually editing every comment to replace them with lorem ipsums and similar rubbish text, I wonder if they would mark that as “suspicious activity” and lock me out of my account? I read some people in the past had similar issues with mass deletions or edits.
Read the issues on that git and you’ll see that it only works on comments visible from your profile which has a maximum limit. It doesn’t get everything, because of that profile limit. There is a python script listed in there but it requires an API key.
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