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.
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This is why I make sure that everything I post is offensive or inflammatory. That way, keeping my comments published is counterproductive for the platform, you dumb piece of shit.
See the reason Lemmy is better than Reddit is because you don’t have 37 people jumping down your throat right now because they didn’t understand the sarcasm
And you didn’t get a 3 day ban for threatening violence. Even if all you said was “I miss when we could unapologetically punch Nazis.”
Reminds me of my Reddit “violence” ban. I said that RFK voters should have their brains looked inside for more brain worms. Admins took this to mean literally open their heads up, killing them in the process.
Reddit will ban you for literally anything if it gets dogpiled hard enough with reports.
As long as this kind of thread doesn’t get repeated over and over.
Damn, I wish I thought of this before. Instead I tried so hard to be nice and helpful 😔
Helpful, abrasive, profane; you can be all three at once!
you dumb piece of shit.
😢 I know, I’m sorry, I’m trying
No, no, no… not you. You’re great! Your posts are great, your attitude is great, your hair looks good. I love everything about you. I was just making a comment about how sites like Reddit deserve to be littered with offensive and insulting comments you fucking moron.
That’s a great idea, eat shit butthead. ;-)
Thank you for the kind words you sack of cat shit.
ThatsMySecretCap.jpg I’m always snarky.
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.
There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI
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.
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).
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.
I’ve replaced all of my Reddit comments for the past year with AI generated nonsense. It seems to have stuck. I plan on going through all of my past comments but will spread it out over time so that it’s harder to restore.
IMO the key is making a post that writes gibberish but that is good enough to suck a user in to read it for a few seconds before they realize it is BS. That kills the user experience and poisons the site.
Not gonna lie, I was worried your second paragraph was going to turn into Mankind throwing Undertaker off of Hell in a Cell
God you’re evil.
How can I do it?
Speaking of poison, here’s your copypasta from Reddit Black Month.
I’ve been saying this from the start:
Any basic level competency backend team has change history on comments. Crack whatever jokes you like about Reddit but they at least have “basic level competency”
It’s trivial for them to build some filters to detect mass changes and just fuckin roll them back.
If you post ANYTHING on ANY server you don’t own: it’s out there. For ever.
https://media1.tenor.com/m/OUzcn0WrxFEAAAAC/sandlot-forever.gif
I always assumed keeping a change history for comments would be cost prohibitive. I mean there are millions of comments and God knows how many changes.
But apparently it’s not a problem to keep versions of them. It doesn’t blow up the database?
If you’re storing change deltas rather than whole copies of comments, the changes for all of Reddit should be far smaller than the comments for all of Reddit.
Even storing full comments isn’t much more storage. Just consider it as another random comment from someone else. Doubt most people edit their comments so 95% of comments only have 1 copy. Hell they used (maybe still do) ignore edits in the first 5 min or something likely so people could fix typos/formatting before they start storing history separately.
So they keep the change logs. Just don’t provide them for the users’ benefit.
Sounds like what everyone else in all the spaces, does.
Each change is less costly to store than each comment, and the system processes millions of comments per day.
Yep. I just deleted my top comments and deleted the account. I wasn’t a high fluting karma whore, but it was 15 years worth. I still open reddit accidentally often, and that site is for sure going for the generic social media route. Such a shame.
I learned this like 10 years ago at least
That’s pretty fuckin cool
Are you sure it was previously deleted stuff? I thought the same thing had happened to me but it was due to subreddits being private at the time of deletion then later coming out of private (some weeks or months later) preventing those then privated posts/comments from being deleted. I think running another automated tool again should do the trick at this point.
Also, there’s non-rolling limit to how much shows in a user profile. All the delete/modify scripts I’ve seen work through the user profile, cycling each sorting method to access as much as possible. For old accounts, or just ones with enough activity, there’s going to be shit not visible there. Have to search with other means if you want to get everything in that case.
This is my problem. Account is 16 years old and I have nearly 500k karma.
Something about
sellingadding gasoline to the fire?
There might be something to this. I went and checked just now, prompted by a your comment, and I found a handful (like, six) comments from ages ago on reddit that did not get torched when I did my mass edit-and-delete, somehow. I found these mostly because some punters found them and necroposted on those threads, so I have notifications regarding them.
I found a few more and deleted those by hand, too. Most of them were from the same sub, so that sub was probably locked when I did my mass delete.
It seems to be undeleted. I confirmed that everything was gone at that time, and I am seeing no obvious pattern so far. I could be mistaken, but that’s how it appears.
Are you a resident of the EU? If so, I believe you have the legal right to demand that reddit delete all of your data and user content, and by law they must comply.
If you are a US citizen, I believe you have very little recourse in forcing them to delete your data, unless you are a resident of California or Virginia.
They’ll usually process GDPR requests for anyone at these hacked together tech companies. It’s not worth the dev time to build two separate flows
I wonder what the legality of transferring ownership of the account to someone in the EU in order to request gdpr enforcement would be… Or I suppose you could become an EU resident but that would be rather difficult.
Most likely you could just hit it from a proxy and say you are from the EU.
Actually, the GDPR applies to EU citizens no matter where they are so you shouldn’t have to make your request from the EU for them to have to believe it
They aren’t your comments anymore. Pray they don’t change the deal any further.
On a plus side, maybe, if you choose to delete your comments and posts again, albeit slowly, would be to copy/paste the really useful shit to Lemmy. I say this because one unintended (or not) consequence of these actions is that posts from years ago, explaining the solution to a problem that still pops up now and then, doesn’t have the solution most of the time.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment or actions at all, it just sucks when you find someone having the same issue you are, only to learn it’s on reddit and the solution to said problem was deleted.
Yes, I’m considering this. Since I will have to go a few at a time it seems, I should be able to leave individual comments.
That would be pretty boss of you. Thanks for being helpful on the past and considering leaving that help available to all!
::6 months later::
Reddit announces users need to log in to view posts and comments
Fffffffffff
Does the internet archive scrape Reddit? Or have they?
I had a similar issue. I had probably two million comment karma spread across about a dozen accounts. My first account was quickly auto-banned from several subreddits as soon as I started editing old comments. Those pro-spez mods had seen what people were doing during the exodus, and set the automod to ban those who tried.
Then I did the same with my second, third, fourth, etc accounts. All of those were immediately site banned for ban evasion, because I was interacting with subs my first account had just been banned in. So none of the edits on those later accounts were pushed through.
Reddit later un-banned those accounts, and all of my old comments were visible again. Likely to make the old comments show up.
Just wait till you hear how Lemmy “deletes” things. Illegal revenge and child porn, genocidal hate speech, everything is stored forever and in some apps, not even obscured.
Yeah, I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the fediverse is far worse. Lemmy is among the worst activity pub implementations in this regard, and they are all pretty fundamentally flawed.
Federated platforms are by nature trickier in this regard. Even email is difficult to truly delete.
We as admin can very much delete your existence upon request or if we wish. I think they also make purging photo easier too. Federated content though, that’s a different thing.
If you see that shit then report it.
To be far, anything posted to the internet is there forever.
Then again, that doesn’t mean Lemmy can’t improve
If you are from EU, you might try envoking the GDPR maybe? Though most make it incredibly difficult afaik
I just checked and Reddit did the same with my account. I spent hours editing and ultimately deleting my posts and comments, and the Spez Gestapo just undeleted years worth of content. I’m going to go through them again and this time I’ll leave the gibberish.
It’s one of the reasons I never deleted my account there every time my stuff pops back up I trounce it down again.
Speaking of which, I just checked and YEAH, not everything I ever posted is back, not even all the highest rated stuff, but a lot has come back and deleting more than a few at a time starts throwing errors :)
I find it very funny to think of how aggressively Reddit was banning people, particularly back in 2016. And how algorithmic they got in censoring and shadowbanning certain comments and accounts.
But now that real human interactions are more valuable than gold, they’re trying to reverse it all again.
I just only did the first step: replace all I had written with random gibberish. And then I did nothing. Just left it there. And the gibberish is still there. Mission accomplished. One of the goals of this method was to feed KI with Nonsense. Obviously I wasn’t the only person who did so. And it looks like it has worked.
Actually using AI gibberish for this might be the best strategy of all, since Reddit seems hell bent on making money with AI training and feeding AI generated text into AI training has been shown to yield increasingly worse results over time. So you make the product Reddit is selling less attractive.
I’ve been doing the same thing, went back to read it now, and I have to admit I had a good time. Even though it took time to manually turn my comments into gibberish, it gave some hilarious results!
That may be worthwhile… But very time consuming.
Same thing like you did. The difference is I only edited the content and then I just left it. Deleting everything leads to reddit undeleting it. Leaving the Nonsense there did not trigger their alarm.
Good to know!
