cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1180367
There are tools out there that help with this, but the better ones like the one I linked use the API.
I don’t know what will happen to them next month, but if you are thinking about it, keep in mind that they may not be around or work like they do today, and you may have to use other more convoluted tools.
For now I am holding off on deleting everything, I don’t think I will ever go back (Lemmy is so much better) but I do want to wait to see the outcome of it going dark before I decide to remove all of my posts & comments.
Is there any good way to sell an acct with 150k karma to a spammer?
Yep. Deleted thousands of my comments and posts today.
It really sucks that thousands of potentially useful reddit comments might go away because the CEO fucked up so incredibly badly.
I personally used this tool over PowerDeleteSuite. Has a bit of a nicer GUI as well and an app for every OS
Thanks. I just used it to delete my posts.
Been working great. Wiped 4 accounts, including one of mine that’s been active for EIGHT years.
Tool works great, cleaned my my Reddit and Twitter accounts, it’s Kbin and Mastadon for me!
Did you know you can follow mastodon users from kbin and vice versa!? The feediverse is kinda amazing.
Very dumb question on my part, but why would someone do this as opposed to just deleting account or simply never logging in again? Deleting my history never occurred to me and I have one super old account (inactive) and my current is about 8 years old
They are going to be selling this data to big companies with deep pockets who can easily fork out the cost. Companies looking for new datasets to feed next generation AIs. So if you don’t want them profiting off of selling your content (comments/posts) over and over, then delete them.
Are there any guarantees for Reddit that things that are deleted are actually deleted from their servers? One of their biggest assets is the data that they hold, If I were in their position and trying to maintain some value with a significant portion of my user base leaving scorched earth I’d be holding on to that data just removing it from the public facing application.
I doubt there are any guarantees about anything you delete from the Internet ever being really deleted. There are websites that are dedicated to saving comments so they can be seen after being removed or deleted. Certainly reddit could backup everything and only delete the live data. But deleting it from live is all we can do. For me, it’s about principle, not privacy. I never really shared too much there, only used it about 9 months.
Deleting it decreases the risk of people outside of reddit easily being able to scrape your history, although obviously there are tools out there that archive basically everything that’s posted so nothing’s guaranteed to be erased from the whole internet. There’s a 0% chance that when you “delete” a comment on reddit it’s actually being removed from their backend, it’s just being hidden from public view.
It’s to hurt reddits usefulness in the search rankings. Less content on the site means that they should get less traffic in general.
Doubt this does anything special If you’re not in gdpr or the CA version reddit can just lie to you about deleting anything
I agree - generally speaking they’re almost certainly not actually deleting anything when they say they are, just flagging it as gone. And edits are probably stored as diffs. AND so many people have been scraping Reddit for long enough now that there’s full copies of everything you’ve posted out there already.
Commenting to save this tool for deleting content from my Reddit account. (Is there an easier way to save posts? Haven’t seen it yet)
Wow perfect, thank you!
you’re welcome!
I deleted my account yesterday, but did not delete my posts and comments. I forgot that I even needed to do that.
How do you go about deleting your reddit?
It’s in the settings. I don’t have an account anymore to guide you, but it should be straight forward.
Cool, I never knew deleting your account existed, but I’m on board. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing the app. Wish I would have known about this before I manually deleted my most useful comments. Didn’t get to all of them though. Oh well feels good to be somewhere new and look forward to exploring here.
You’re welcome!
I used this tool myself. It deleted thousands of posts & comments automatically. It’s pretty simple to use.
same and i agree. it’s really easy to use, and even if it throws errors, it still was able to delete everything off my reddit of 10 years.
It’s like breaking up with an ex and deleting old photos. What a weight off!
LOL! for me personally, when i thought of deleting my account, i wanted it 100% gone and not just my posts with a [deleted] for a username on them.
Having been active for a better part of 10 years it can definitely be a little emotional wiping it all, but it’s for the best. Fuck them and all they stand for.
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Lemmy is less private than reddit. With reddit your comments exist on one server, with lemmy by design for they are spread across different servers in the fediverse and can remain if you delete the original.
Think of it like email, there’s no way to recall the email once it’s sent and same with your actions on lemmy.
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I guess I’ll keep doing the same thing I do when browsing reddit.
yep! maintain your anonymity 👍
I understand the sentiment, and everyone of course has the right to do this with the content they posted, but please consider:
The only thing this probably achieves is fucking over people googling for specific information in the future. How often have I searched for some really specific problem or information, only to find a thread in some niche subreddit from years ago with exactly what I needed?
For Reddit itself it’s trivial to keep previous versions of comments. Also deleted posts can just be flagged as ‘hidden’ and still remain in the database. They already have your content and won’t be giving it up. So please consider leaving it available for the public as well.
