TL;DR: even if your delete script confirms a full wipe and your Reddit profile page shows zero comment, there may still be comments left over (that you can find through a search engine and delete manually on Reddit).

Weeks ago, I used redact.dev to delete all my Reddit comments (thousands of them over 10+ years). Redact.dev confirmed a full wipe, and my Profile > Comments page on Reddit confirmed I had no comment left.

Yet, as of today, Google still returns dozens of results for “$myredditusername site:reddit.com”. It’s not just Google’s crawler lagging; when I follow those links, those comments are still visible on the Reddit website, under my username, where I have the ability to manually delete them.

Thankfully, I hadn’t yet nuked my account, because I knew of other users whose deleted comments got reinstated (although that was thought to be caused by the deletion script exceeding the API rate limit; supposedly a different case, as those missed comments would still show in the Profile page).

spez: edited for clarity.

  • abff08f4813c
    2•1 year ago

    Don’t understand why people are surprised that a private company would like to hold on to your data and keep it active no matter what you want or think or do.

    Maybe because reddit literally says they will allow you to change this on their privacy policy?

    https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy

    Your Rights and Choices
    Accessing and Changing Your Information
    You can access your information and change or correct certain information through the Services.

    anything you do there is just adding to their monetization of your activity … the best thing to do is to do nothing

    Well, saving a copy of your content, overwriting it, and then deleting it - I don’t see how this leads to additional monetization. It’s actually better than doing nothing because it prevents further monetization.

    Ditto with deleting of accounts (as opposed to deletion of content) vs abandoning of accounts. The latter means that reddit can inflate their number of accounts in some ways, etc.

    • IninewCrow
      1•1 year ago

      Your comment made me rethink about what to do with me Reddit accounts … I’ve taken the past two days to auto delete all my comments, posts and submissions, deactivate all my mod accounts, unsubscribe from all the subs I followed … and in a day or two, I’ll complete delete the accounts.

      I know Reddit will still hold onto pieces of my account everywhere … but at least they’ll have a harder time justifying it all.