2y ago

Nuking old Reddit accounts

I took part in the Reddit blackout a month ago, and accessed Reddit through Apollo. After the blackout I looked at Reddit a handful of times and then let my association with Reddit die with Apollo.

I haven’t been there since, but now I feel as though I should have deleted my account of 7 years, that way everything I ever contributed will be gone.

However, to accomplish this as you all know I should delete all my posts first and edit all comments. I was wondering what people used to do this. I want everything to read “Edit: moved to Lemmy”.

I’m sure others migrating here have the same question. Thanks.

52 comments

I'm conflicted about this. Given how much information is locked into Reddit communities, if everyone purged their accounts we'd lose an immense amount of useful knowledge. On the other hand, that is exactly how to hit Reddit where it hurts.
- I look at it this way… I’d rather the information start being posted here or somewhere besides Reddit, and eventually that place will be more relevant.
  Reddit is not essential.
  
  But… is it posted here? This intentional degradation/rot feels like the burning of Alexandria.
  If one has a history of only making comments that they don't consider to have value then, maybe.
- It's for the greater whole. There's no such thing as a painless revolution.

copied from elsewhere:
To do a full scrub of everything you've ever posted:
Request your GDPR data package here: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
Wait for it to arrive
Use shreddit to fully delete everything: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
This will take a long time if you've posted and commented a lot. This works better than PowerDeleteSuite in my experience, as PDS missed a lot of stuff that was older than a certain point.
There is a way to make it not delete your comments and change what the edited message is, check the readme in the github link.
- Does shreddit still work now that the APIs are turned off? I'd've thought the mass-deletion apps would be the first thing they turned the spigot off for.
  
  This script works as an app attached to your user, and rate limits itself so it doesn't break - that's why it takes so long, though. Took me 25 hours to shred a 6 year old account.
- Thank you.

I purged all my contributions and rewrote my comments to something along the line of „see you at Lemmy“ (which got me some bans) and finally pulled the plug. I started social media with the Usenet. It is only zeros and ones and can be destroyed by tapping the wrong button. 🤷‍♂️
- Lol my favorite was getting a passive aggressive automod message from a subreddit while i was editing/deleting everything using a program.
  It went sorta like "oh it looks like you are editing your comment in protest of reddit...let us delete your comment for you then"
  I just fucking laughed at it. Somebody actually took the time to go through the automod code to write an angry message for people editing their old comments.

This is the one I used to purge like a third of my post history so far: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Seems to be working well.
Be careful not to just delete your account and your comments but to make your comments unusable through editing them. That way, there is nothing useful in there should admins decide to restore your comments against your will.
- It's not just a conspiracy theory that they have restored deleted comments.
  I deleted all of my comments twice because they were restored after the "blackout" a few weeks ago, even though they were deleted well before that outage started.
  
  I am in this pickle and idk what to do. I purged all my content and requested the data under gdpr. Finally I got my data and what do ya know? Theres a whole section of my (undeleted???) comments, with additional info like date, which subreddit etc. Before I purged my comments I edited them saying "fuck spez" lol and the list I got from Reddit was mixed edited and unedited. How is that even possible?When I log in, my page is empty, as if everything is actually deleted. What to do now?
  
  Exactly. I've heard the same from many other Lemmings here.
- Really? I used PowerDeleteSuite myself, but I did it a few days before they locked up the API. My understanding was that PowerDeleteSuit needed API access to work.
  
  I had read the same thing, but it did work for me a couple of days ago. YMMV obviously.
  I was planning on deleting the rest soon; I can post an update if you're interested.
- Thanks! And I love your DP!
  
  Sorry, DP? Kinda at a loss here lol.

Also another note: as an old Apollo user I love the Memmy app for Lemmy. Very similar. Just a heads up for anyone in the same boat not aware of Memmy.
- I’m using voyager and it’s a good Apollo replacement as well!

I used Power Delete Suite. It does work fine with one caveat: It'll only action on posts/comments that are displayed in your Reddit user profile.
You'd think that's enough but I'm pretty sure Reddit's own backend database is broken. There are definitely posts/comments within Reddit that are yours but won't display in your own Reddit profile. Like I think for older accounts sometimes posts/comments get disassociated from your profile page & you won't see them anymore unless you search around in reddit.com or via google.
For example before I deleted anything I did a backup using Power Delete Suite. Now that my Reddit user profile is mostly empty I am still finding old comments using the standard reddit.com search, & I can still edit/delete those manually even though they do not display in my Reddit profile. And interestingly they don't appear in my backup file that was created with Power Delete Suite - Leading me to believe that these comments exist in Reddit's database but somehow got detached from displaying in my main Reddit profile.
.. so depending how you want to go about it, maybe don't close your Reddit account right away. You may need it if you want to search for & edit/delete posts/comments that don't display in your Reddit profile.
- Power Delete Suite will allow you to edit your posts with the message of your choosing and then delete them. Idk if it'll let you edit them without deleting them. The edit feature is to create a new entry on the database in case reddit isn't actually deleting comments from their database when they show as deleted. Although if they're doing that then they probably keep a change log of the comments as well.
  
  Idk if it’ll let you edit them without deleting them.
  Yup it does, that's how I used it. Did a cycle to edit with random words, afterwards checked if it worked & if it looked okay went ahead with a delete.
  The edit feature is to create a new entry on the database in case reddit isn’t actually deleting comments from their database when they show as deleted. Although if they’re doing that then they probably keep a change log of the comments as well.
  You know I thought that too. But I've seen some people talk about their GDPR data requests & they received the last edited version of their posts/comments, not the original. The data request doesn't even contain anything like a change log of every post/comment. But I guess you could argue the data request is fulfilled with just the last version regardless of how many versions of the same post/comment actually exists.

Redact.dev I don't know if it still works with the API changes and I'm too lazy to look, but I assume it probably is still capable. It can rewrite your comments for you, then delete them.
- I've just used it last week, it still works fine. And since spez got a reputation for editing comments against him, I didn't delete my account, just edit the comments and delete posts. I'm gonna edit them again sometime in case that cunt edits my comment

Thanks for this! I finally decided to nuke my Reddit comments. I was mostly a lurker anyway, and I will probably still keep the account. Its too bad they have gone the way of Digg, I loved that site.

Exactly the same thing, but with Boost on Android. Such a shame...

Honestly I think there is an overvalutatin on what was shared. Do you really think to popping gold by comments? I mean, at best you probably have 3 or 4 moments in one year. This hostage situation is all inside the head so far.
- It’s not so much that I think my content was such a great and big addition to the site on why I want to delete. In fact, it’s not that at all.
  I just like the idea of Reddit being riddled with posts with comment threads that don’t offer much as a whole as most stuff has been removed. I’m just trying to do my part, and if it makes a few people aware of Lemmy, all the better.
- Eh it depends. When we had one of our subs locked there in protest we constantly received modmail from random google searchers asking to be let in so they can read random posts they found via google. The funny thing is many of those posts were things I had commented answers in. Makes me wonder how many of those google searches are now dead ends after the comment answer was deleted.
  On the other side, back when I was a mod there I used to point people to earlier posts that discussed whatever question was being asked & sometimes people would complain that the earlier posts were useless since other people deleted their own comment answers in them. Even before Reddit protests people would routinely wipe their Reddit history, as a mod it was easy to see it happen in real time.
  So overall people deleting their own comments does have some effect on making searches pointing to Reddit, or within Reddit, kind of useless.
  
  I get this but still feeling in debt looks bad. This feel of begin necessary that makes impossible to delete and go on. I know sometimes reddit comments offert good Info's, still this can't be mean that a single website as to be the repository of all knowage, expeccialy if that website is corrupted. That is the check to avoid.

52 comments