Very coincidentally, I ended up on Reddit this morning. I was doing some research and saw my old username show up in the search results, so of course I clicked.
Ya’ll, when I left Reddit, I used one of those automated tools to edit all my content and change it to gibberish before ultimately deleting it. When I left, not a single post or comment of mine remained in my account history nor in the subs I was active in (I checked). And yet this morning I found out that my old, formerly deleted content was restored at some point in the past 2 - 3 years since I left.
Reddit would only offer the last 1k comments to those tools. You need to wait a few hours or days after running them then get the next 1k. It did delete the ones it was offered, it just wasn’t offered all of your comments.
I’m sharing as this gives you the knowledge to go finish the job, if you so choose.
Depends on what you used. If you used power delete suite then that was limited by the number of comments accessible on your profile, so one run wouldn’t overwrite or delete your comments. You’d have to keep running it over and over again once your profile became repopulated with comments that weren’t showing before. So it wasn’t something that could be done in one go.
Proper way to do it back then was to put in a request for GDPR, and use those files with reddit api and use shreddit to overwrite and delete all the comments.
That one sounds familiar, so it may be what I used.
I confirmed all my comments and posts were gone at that time, and I think I had to run the tool multiple times. In addition, I’ve heard folks mention that their content was restored after doing this delete, so from time to time I’d go back and check to confirm all my stuff is gone. However, after a while I just never went back to look, so it’s likely been well over a year since I last confirmed.
This time it was just really strange to see my former username in the google search results after being away for 2 - 3 years, so I was expecting to click and see [deleted] on my comments. NOPE.
Yeah you have to check that specific comments you deleted remain deleted, since ones that showed up could just be ones that regular automated deleting methods couldn’t access at the time due to profile comment display limits.
So the profile might have a limit of displaying 1000 comments and if you ran something like power delete suite it would delete 1000, but if you had more than that like 5000 comments there would be 4000 left that wasn’t deleted due to being inaccessible at the time. After some time the next 1000 would show up in the profile that hadn’t been viewable before. So you’d basically have to run it like 5 times to delete everything over weeks.
I do remember people recommending to rewrite comments and then delete later in case comments are restored. Some using messages like this comment has be deleted and if you are seeing this it means it has been restored.
Deleting messages and accounts doesn’t remove them, it merely marks them as Deleted. The content is still there. According to the docs for tools like shreddit (which I’ve used myself) which replace comments with gibberish before deleting them, reddit only keeps the most recent copy of content. Based on what you’re saying this seems to be wrong - possibly reddit keeps periodic backups. They might even have anti-shredding software that scans for masses of gibberish and restores previous content from one of those backups. Just a theory.
This has been a known thing for a while. This happened to most if not all people who tried scrambling their comments. It was a valiant effort and certainly cost Reddit some money but it didn’t work.
Very coincidentally, I ended up on Reddit this morning. I was doing some research and saw my old username show up in the search results, so of course I clicked.
Ya’ll, when I left Reddit, I used one of those automated tools to edit all my content and change it to gibberish before ultimately deleting it. When I left, not a single post or comment of mine remained in my account history nor in the subs I was active in (I checked). And yet this morning I found out that my old, formerly deleted content was restored at some point in the past 2 - 3 years since I left.
Ain’t that some bullshit?
Reddit would only offer the last 1k comments to those tools. You need to wait a few hours or days after running them then get the next 1k. It did delete the ones it was offered, it just wasn’t offered all of your comments.
I’m sharing as this gives you the knowledge to go finish the job, if you so choose.
It’s a common story, unfortunately.
That’s why you had to do it slowly over time. Not all at once. Common thing they did
Depends on what you used. If you used power delete suite then that was limited by the number of comments accessible on your profile, so one run wouldn’t overwrite or delete your comments. You’d have to keep running it over and over again once your profile became repopulated with comments that weren’t showing before. So it wasn’t something that could be done in one go.
Proper way to do it back then was to put in a request for GDPR, and use those files with reddit api and use shreddit to overwrite and delete all the comments.
That one sounds familiar, so it may be what I used.
I confirmed all my comments and posts were gone at that time, and I think I had to run the tool multiple times. In addition, I’ve heard folks mention that their content was restored after doing this delete, so from time to time I’d go back and check to confirm all my stuff is gone. However, after a while I just never went back to look, so it’s likely been well over a year since I last confirmed.
This time it was just really strange to see my former username in the google search results after being away for 2 - 3 years, so I was expecting to click and see [deleted] on my comments. NOPE.
Yeah you have to check that specific comments you deleted remain deleted, since ones that showed up could just be ones that regular automated deleting methods couldn’t access at the time due to profile comment display limits.
So the profile might have a limit of displaying 1000 comments and if you ran something like power delete suite it would delete 1000, but if you had more than that like 5000 comments there would be 4000 left that wasn’t deleted due to being inaccessible at the time. After some time the next 1000 would show up in the profile that hadn’t been viewable before. So you’d basically have to run it like 5 times to delete everything over weeks.
I do remember people recommending to rewrite comments and then delete later in case comments are restored. Some using messages like this comment has be deleted and if you are seeing this it means it has been restored.
Deleting messages and accounts doesn’t remove them, it merely marks them as Deleted. The content is still there. According to the docs for tools like shreddit (which I’ve used myself) which replace comments with gibberish before deleting them, reddit only keeps the most recent copy of content. Based on what you’re saying this seems to be wrong - possibly reddit keeps periodic backups. They might even have anti-shredding software that scans for masses of gibberish and restores previous content from one of those backups. Just a theory.
They likely started tracking comment deltas at some point for moderation and purposes like this.
Pretty much something like a git diff for every edit.
That being said, they might just straight up store every single edit to every single comment. This wouldn’t be an absurd amount of data by any means.
Which, if you actually take the time to read the post, they did.
I read it, apparently I didn’t digest it. Rewriting my comment.
Yup. I changed all mine and it auto banned me from a bunch of subs. Don’t care, fuck reddit.
I hope you didn’t use redact.dev
It’s been years, so I honestly do not recall. What’s the story on that specific tool?
Dan Saltman is behind that service and he’s aligned with pedophiles, like the streamer Destiny, and supports Israel.
It’s rumored that he keeps the information from the scrubbed comments as potential blackmail.
This has been a known thing for a while. This happened to most if not all people who tried scrambling their comments. It was a valiant effort and certainly cost Reddit some money but it didn’t work.