Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn’t planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that’s a bit concerning. There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.
The API-based deletion tools usually have to be tuned to delete posts slowly enough to not trigger Reddit’s abuse detection. Otherwise, they’ll automatically undo bulk changes like that.
This is, unfortunately, the only way to guarantee that your posts stay deleted. My account was 15 years old. I still log in every few weeks or so to go manually delete more comments. It’ll be a while.
I had to fiddle with my own on my old laptop, I used one of the plethora of github scripts, but then they changed the api to limit access to (I think) about 100/min, so I just changed the delays to 1000ms so it would only delete 60/min.
Took two weeks, but I still haven’t seen any old content pop back up outside of archives and quotes from other comments in the thread.
I search for a couple random things I remember saying on ddg/bing/Google whenever I think about it, so far nothing.
As I’ve said before about certain countries, you know your platform is doing well when you (essentially) tell people “No, sorry, you can’t leave.”
I’m banned from reddit permanently. But I suspect my information is still there. Unsure what to do about it, aside from embracing the fuckedness.
If you’re comfortable mucking about in the dev console and have some aptitude for coding, it’s absolutely possible to reverse-engineer the browser calls thoroughly enough that it’s literally impossible for Reddit to tell serverside that you’re not accessing it through a browser. At that point, all you have to do is introduce some logic to loosely replicate human behavior (time-jittered, of course, as well as some varied activity windows), and you should be able to kick it off on a raspberry pi or some other low-power “I don’t care if it’s on for a few weeks” system and let it ride.
They could just look 5+ years back, gauge the average rate of comment editing (with falloff for time since comment creation), take that as a standard, and pass that as a filter over any modern edits. You would literally have to edit slower than the average bear, especially accounting for older comments.
Yeah, it’s easy enough for reddit to detect rapid edits over a 1-day period and just undo all of them. That seems to be the case here. The edits I did manually were retained.
I used Power Delete Suite (javascript IIRC, via Firefox, year ago) to edit and delete, and mine are still gone. Not sure if it is still effective.
Reddit is probably less and less tolerant about edits and deletions, now that they’re full speed on selling our data. Still see plenty of deleted posts when I’m searching for things, which is… nice I guess (bittersweet).