A few days ago I finally found inspiration to go back and delete all my content from reddit — 15 years’ worth.
I wrote a little script using PRAW to first go through posts then comments, fetching 1,000 at a time (the most the API supports per query) from each category and time frame, then deleting them. This appeared to work perfectly — I now have no comments or posts available when I log in and look at my profile, and my script no longer finds any via the API.
Then yesterday I got notified of a reply to one of my old comments. Clicking through, there was a comment I’d made a year ago, still intact. I confirmed it wasn’t visible through my profile then deleted it, but now I’m worried that much of my content might still be available without being visible in my profile.
Is there something I’m missing? I recall hearing during the API changes that some protections were being put in place to prevent users from deleting their content — have I bumped up against that? Should I just delete my account and forget about it? Would a GDPR request to delete all my data work?
Any insight as to what’s going on here would be much appreciated.
The api never supported returning more than 1000 objects from any given list. this has been a limitation since the API was introduced.
So if you fetch your comments sorted by recent, it will give you the 1000 most recent comments and then stop returning any more. However you may be able to find older comments by e.g. sorting by Top, or Hot, or Controversial. You can also fetch 1000 submissions from New, 1000 submissions from Top etc. This limitation is common to the website, app, and api. It’s just how their database cache works I think.
Much as I’d like to jump on the “reddit bad” bandwagon, this has always been how the API works and is not a recent change. It’s been a frustrating limitation for years.
All apps which claim to delete all your reddit content have this same limitation. A couple of years ago I was able to delete 10k’s of my comments by abusing google and searching for
"my_username" site:reddit.comand scraping the webpage results to find my comments, then deleting them.As far as I have ever been able to tell, when you delete something on reddit it really is gone, unless they have changed something very recently. I seem to remember that they once said they keep a copy internally for about 30 days for legal reasons, i.e. in case it’s reuested by a court etc, then it’s truly deleted.
Honestly as much as “reddit bad”, I seriously doubt they are secretly keeping deleted content.
Reddit’s value is in the comments so if they detect someone mass removing their comments they will fuck with you and not do what you want.
If you wish for your data to be deleted, do a gpdr requests. Deleting your account will not delete your comments.
What if we systematically destroy all Reddit infrastructure and backups? Would that do it?
Many years ago I deleted all posts/comments that were listed under my user profile, but hundreds of them still show up when I use a search engine. I even tried going through all of those search results and deleting the comments directly from where they were posted. Doing that makes it look like the comments are being removed; you can even refresh the page and confirm that you don’t see them anymore, but after some time they always come back. I’ve done multiple cycles of trying to delete these comments and they never actually get removed.
Reddit is run by scumbags.
“I wrote a little script”
Man, there’s a bunch of existing options, including ones that will instead edit your comments…
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite allows you to edit comments
You can see edited comments from time to time, so that seems to work
Yeah this is a known thing. Many people removed their comments (there are ready to use scripts for this if you Google on it). But reddit doesn’t actually delete them.
I guess they just mark it deleted for you. They are fucking awful.
That’s atrocious behaviour if they’re really doing that.
I guess a GDPR request is in order then.
I guess a GDPR request is in order then.
AFAIK something you post on reddit is not personal identifying information. But you might as well try, they might just do it! :D
GDPR doesn’t just protect PII, it also protects user Generated Content.
Yes absolutely. They operate in Europe where this is highly illegal.
I deliberately left my comments up when deleting my Reddit account(s), as I didn’t want to mess up older conversations.
I didn’t want to mess up older conversations
Why?
Because for me personally, people find these discussions via web search, and it’d be a dick move of me to make someone not find a solution to a problem they’re trying to fix.
