Reddit

Use redact and have it delete all your comments and replace them with gibberish. Works great.

I wonder if they undeleted comments that moderators deleted.

It was naïve to believe they'd honour a delete in the first place. Maybe early reddit did, but it would have quickly become apparent that the deleted comments tend to be more interesting ones, so they could hold on to that more interesting data by just setting a "deleted" flag in the db, or maybe moving deleted comments to a different table for optimization reasons.

Same thing with edits. Instead of replacing the old comment with the edited one, just have the edited one be a new comment while the old one is just hidden now.

Can't say I'm surprised that try undid all of that when the intent was to lower reddit's value by removing helpful comments. It wouldn't surprise me if they stop even pretending to go along with edits and deletions. It's out of your hands now and always was from the moment the comment was made.

Same thing with lemmy btw, though through a different mechanism: federation. Anyone can clone all of your activity by just creating a federated instance running custom code that handles deletions and edits differently. I'd be very surprised if no one is already doing this. Federation makes censorship and community control harder but the cost is privacy and control of your own content. The fediverse won't sell out to AI trainers because those entities can just grab the data for free. If there's something you don't want known, the only way to do it is to not post it in the first place. Trying to delete or edit it will probably just mark it as more likely to be interesting.

Thanks for reminding me, I've been meaning to do this. I'm doing random text edit of them all now. I'll go back later and have it edit my top comments to a nice site-ban-worthy message.

I went through and manually deleted all of my comments when I left; they're all back again as well.

They have backups. Even if your old comments and posts stop resurrecting and permanently become invisible to the web, Reddit can do what they please with their backups, including selling them to AI companies. It stops the scrapers, sure, but then Reddit wants the scrapers to stop as well.

GDPR removal requests are worth a try, but they technically only cover personally identifying information, so you'd have to make a strong case that your comments in whole or in part could be tied back to your real self. And they could get around most of the edge cases there if they were to anonymise that information further, such as by disconnecting each of your comments from any commonality.

This is part of the reason I never bothered to delete anything over there. No point closing that stable door. Those horses are long gone.

Meh. It's their content, why shouldn't they be able to do what they want with it?

god damn, that is dirty. i redacted my comments the same way on different accounts when I was done with them. I'll need to be paying closer attention to them.

gross that they'll just do this. they don't know why I buried my accounts, no consideration if undeleting people's posts is safe for them. Are they doing it so companies training LLM's on reddit have access to more text?

Oh, my sweet summer child. They were never your comments, you just wrote them. They belong to King Steven the Turd, Greediest of Pigboys now.

during the API purge the did a mass undeletion of everything, I think. stuff I wrote and deleted years ago was unearthed. People were deleting things en masse and reddit threw a fit. they went beyond undeleting recent things and just restored literally everything, it seems

I went to check and yeah reddit undeleted all my comments and posts as well

If you can still log in, maybe making a series of edits to each comment to gradually turn them into nonsense wouldn’t trigger anything on Reddit’s side to undelete them or impede your editing.

I'm glad you made this post. Reddit banned me after some pro-luigi posting after 13 years on the platform.

I checked and all my comments are still there so I should start cleaning them up. No reason they should be able to make money from me anymore

Reddit has had a “bug” for years where when you delete comments and posts it says they’re deleted but never actually verified they were.

When you delete quickly the API just says it’s deleted. You have to reload and purge multiple times to actually remove your content.

I wouldn’t put it past Reddit to undelete content, but at the time a lot of the complaints Reddit was restoring content were due to this bug.

It’s been a bug for at least 10 years.

That's pretty bold even for a greedy social media sell-out. Glad you found the right tool to counteract, though whether they're really deleted still remains to be seen.

You could try a GDPR request. They are required to actually delete it permanently from their database and backups.

Add a "death to musk" comment, guarantee that one won't be restored

If people just started saying nonsense on a bunch of reddit posts, would the bots eventually follow suit?

I deleted all of my comments years ago, but kept my account because of one subreddit. I just looked and all of my posts have been restored. I just downloaded Redact and started deleting again. On edit: I wish I saw the link to the tool you used before I rushed off to check my Reddit account. I'm unimpressed with Redact.

I just checked mine, my wipe is still complete save for 2 comments I think the tool missed. Around same time, June '23 but later in the month

Lemmy will also be crawled by AI so what's the point now