Just the cost of pissing off all the highly technical users who helped build the place.
Exactly. Just used Redact myself a few weeks ago.
I wish I’d done that. I deleted my 12 year old account right before learning about these tools.
Thanks! Doing this tomorrow
Let it run during the night, mine took 20 hours or so to finish up. Reddit throttles the requests you make to its API, so it’s slow
I don’t make a habit of trusting Gits with zero stars.
I don’t either, but if no one ever tries github projects with zero stars how are they supposed to get stars?
Ah yes because the thing that makes 140 LOC you can read and understand in five minutes trustworthy is the number of other people who clicked a star button
/s
Yes, because large corporations on the Internet definitely wouldn’t try to sway this metric at all, get off your own ass man fuck you
Explain how any of this is sus, you don’t need to be a programmer:
https://github.com/Aryanb1102/Redact-Reddit-Data-Deleter/blob/main/reddit_data_deleter.py
Read it then. It’s literally a single script with 140 lines.
When Reddit’s API debacle happened lots of people moved away. Some deleted their comments, some edited them with a message in protest. But sadly the consequences is that a lot of history and useful information got lost in the process.
I don’t know how I feel about this. I understand why it’s done and even why it needs to be done, but it still makes me sad considering the amount of times where Reddit saved me from massive headaches with IT stuff and so on…
As someone who deleted their posts… yes. The goal was to make Reddit worse, by removing my contributions to it because they forgot where their value came from.
My content had some small value to them. They didn’t deserve it.
I hope they delete all your stuff when your account gets banned because I’ve left at least three of those in my wake
I’m fairly certain they do not
Cool they can have all my toxic hatred against Republicans for their AI to learn from
They don’t delete your content, they just redact your username and disassociate each individual comment from your larger profile so nobody could, for example, click on the deleted user who posted a comment in r/abc and see they also posted a particular comment in r/xyz.
The reason tools like Redact (many of them all use this same name lol) have taken off in popularity is because they delete, or redact the contents of your posts before you delete the account, thus making even that vestigial data worthless.
Its not guaranteed. They may keep a copy of the original post around.
In fact, anyone could
I believe they are still there but hidden.
Quite possibily it depends on the type of ban you received (e.g. spam vs inflicting harm on xyz)
I know better than the threatened people online. It was all stupid political bullshit.
That’s not really what I meant.
What I was trying to say is no ban is equal. Reddit may very well have nuance to bans they can utilize that will prevent you from just participating in comments/upvotes to full on shadow-bans.
I hear these justifications a lot, but the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.
The value of the archival data that can be affected by deleting or editing is almost entirely only user-accessed value. Reddit isn’t harmed at all from the edits. It primarily needs active regular users to improve its stock value. Alternatively, it can sell archival data for AI training.
Editing old comments removes neither value source from Reddit. You moved away from it so deprived it of both the material value of new comments and the statistical value of being an active user. Reddit also assuredly has saved data from before the API issue and can likely spot and clean the mass edits to sell the data from training purposes.
Conversely, the value to users and society is high. So many solutions to problems that are gone forever. The Internet is decaying already and it gets harder to find useful information, and those leaving decided to just burn down a library of Alexandria.
It’s their - and your - right, sure. They’re by definition done on comments the user owns. But this is just punching desperate Internet users in the face hoping it gives Reddit a bloody nose.
Would you sign up for a social media website if all the tech support posts looked like the above?
I wouldn’t sign up for a social media website if all the useful posts were from before June, 2023.
That’s why the people deleting their posts also stop posting
This. Good points above an all, but they missed this being the main point. imo
If that were true, then why did Reddit respond to the mass deletions (that’s what people did at first, not edits) by undeleting the comments?
those leaving decided to just burn down a library of Alexandria.
More like I had my book taken off the shelves because the librarians are dicks
the highest value content, is mostly political anyways, its draws in more money for a platform, because users are addicted ragebait.
Reddit undeleted a lot of the content removed during the API debacle. This comment must have been after that because you can see the latest comment is post API changes.
That’s why I didn’t close my account and still do a new turn of mass edits every 2-3 months. I have nothing deleted, just constantly overwritten. I get regularly banned from some subreddits after each wave, probably because some comments may trigger some sort of spam detection and edits alert the mods then.
reddit can detect if you did massedit as suspicious activity, a normal person cant change multiple comments at once, but with a script they will see it as botting.
The sad part of it is that they (reddit) can still access that deleleted information and sell it for AI training. Even as a “power” user you can use websites that “undelete” that content. The only ones truly affected by this are people randomly browsing reddit.
I mean it does reduce the value of the content that users created on reddit if a ton of random comments were deleted in protest. Every time you hit a thread like the OOP it reduces reddit 's value to the individual, and in aggregate it reduces reddits value
Did you actually read my comment? That’s an issue casual users have. If you want to see deleted comments, there’s a way to do that.
The only thing that actually hurts reddit is if people stop using it an generating new content.
We lost the story of the guy with broken arms and his mom.
Well, this happens if you don’t respect your users.
…or your moderators
…or your third party developers…or MY AXE!!
Fuck the mods; bunch of thin skinned morons.
You get what you pay for…
I just realized this could be taken at least a couple different ways.
The way I intended was, Reddit relies fully on the free labor of volunteers for moderation.
It wasn’t intended to be a comment on not paying for Reddit. I believe all users on Reddit provide free value to the company whether by posting, commenting, or voting.
Fuck the owners and resulting enshitifacation too.
now hiding history to avoid bot detection by other users, but they are banning people allegedly to be bots, but not actual propaganda bots themselves.
I mean some, yeah. It’s a community-run system, so naturally for every bad user, there’s a bad mod, too.
But there’s also a good mod for every good user, basically.
I did the same.
Reddit showed it didn’t give a fsck about my user experience with their banning of third party apps, but they still wanted to sell the content I put the effort in to providing.
Screw you guys. You want to make money off hosting my words, whatever. But don’t stick a pineapple up my arse at the same time and expect me not to feel it.
I wished I’d deleted all my comments and posts before deleting my account.
Don’t forget they’re also selling all your freely provided content to AI scrapers as well. Fuck Reddit.
I wonder what happens to your account when you get banned
Believe it or not, straight to the AI farm.
From what I can tell, it continues to exist, but you can no longer post. They’re not gonna just give up all that free data.
Cool they can have all my toxic hatred against Republicans for their AI to learn from
shadowban will however keeps your posts hidden from the public, but not from reddit itself.
This post of mine still comes up.
They will just put them back. Your stuff isn’t really deleted.
Yeah… I did this too when leaving. Made a small app to edit and delete every comment I made. I actually had a useful IT related self hosting post which was also nuked. I guess that’s the price the whole community had to pay for reddits thirst for profit.
Although, long ago, I heard of a rumor; all of reddit was frequently backed up and available for download. Is that still a thing? Was it ever a thing?
Can you post your app on GitHub? Many of us would love it. (Especially now if I ever need to visit the US I would have to delete all my JD Vance couch fucker comments)
Someone in this thread posted a similar thing that’s probably better. When I left, there wasn’t anything like it so I had to cobble something together.
There was pushshift, but it’s locked down since the API thing, there’s pullpush.io, but that seems down atm. Also there is reveddit. I think most or all of these do not store content that has been deleted by the user though.
I heard of a rumor; all of reddit was frequently backed up and available for download
I don’t know about “available for download” (probably not), but: modern websites tend to have their content stored in a database, and databases are (or should be) regularly backed up to tape drive or optical disks or whatever. This means, fundamentally, that everything ever posted to a social media site like reddit or facebook will be in existence permanently, regardless of what efforts users take to subsequently delete their history from the current instance of the database.
The only way to truly “delete your data” would be to re-mount each old backup and delete the data in each of them before re-backing them up (or else destroying all the backups). No social media site does this or even could do this. Furthermore, when it comes to keeping your comment history out of the clutches of AI, I would almost guarantee that when a site like reddit sells its data to companies to train the AI on, they are selling old backups from before users started mass-deleting their posts.
WTF? View removed comment?
Welcome to “soft delete”, where database entries are marked with a “deleted” flag instead of being actually deleted. Makes it trivial to restore things a user has “deleted”. Actually, even without soft deletes, modern databases maintain an audit trail which tracks all changes made anywhere, which also makes it easy to restore “deleted” items. And actually actually, databases are regularly backed up and when a user “deletes” their data the sites don’t go into the backups and delete the data there, so everything anyone posts is technically in existence forever (not really because because backups won’t last forever but they can last a very long time).
I’m sure that when reddit sells its data to companies to train their AI on, they’re selling backups from before users started mass-deleting their histories.
It’s for alternate Reddit front-ends and rarely ever works.
This must be new.
Good.
They went public and made bank on free user input. Those users rebelled so the platform would suck.
It may still be standing but I feel we won over a year ago.
Thanks for getting me to finally run one of these scripts to scramble and delete everything in my old account. Fuck every American corporation and their user experience.
They restored all my comments a few months later, so I’ve tried it again by editing all my comments to gibberish.
I keep checking mine, no reverse yet. Been a few months, 2 since my last purge
Exactly the tool I’ve used. I purged it about a year ago and randomly discovered that everything was restored about a month ago. I don’t know when it was restored, though.
I get that it’s annoying, but reddit deserves to burn.
Reddit as a company is 100% unaffected by this
To an extent they are. Part of the appeal of Reddit was that you could find good answers there. But yeah, the idea that “long term their reputation may suffer” is hardly affecting them in any demonstrable way now.
100% unaffected? It makes their data worth a lot less for AI training. Even if they keep comment history, these are edits - how do you determine which edit to use? Using all of them poisons the data, and picking one risks doing the same.
On top of that, reddit has quickly become a non-source for opinions… I used to append “reddit” to any search where I wanted candid feedback, but absolutely would never do that these days. That’s less traffic, which is less ad money, which comprises the vast majority of their revenue. Reputation is virtually the only thing that matters for search, and Reddit’s reputation has been sliding for years.
People paying reddit aren’t training their models by scraping the web ui.
The original comments are still in the database, which is what you’d pipe into an LLM.
That’s less traffic, which is less ad money, which comprises the vast majority of their revenue.
and how many people do the same thing you do? they don’t really care about 1% of dedicated users…
…you’re joking, right? There is not a company in the world that is happy to ignore 1/100th of their revenue disappearing.
Is it going to kill reddit? Of course not. Are they “100% unaffected?” Of course not.
There is not a company in the world that is happy to ignore 1/100th of their revenue disappearing
except we are talking about USERS disappearing, not revenue. it is likely that revenue actually increased, because x+n (where n > 0) people paying more than zero generating more than zero is bigger number than x generating zero.
Reddit’s primary source of revenue is ads, that is a simple fact. What metrics do you think matter when it comes to ad revenue?
and how many ads do you think all these now gone power users were displaying and consuming? 😂
the more technical helpful users are likely to do it, you think the vast majority of users give helpful comments?
Sure, but the users are.
reddit is quickly making itself irrelevant.
who knew extreme censorship would be bad for the exchange of information??
This actually isn’t necessarily censorship. This is more likely users deleting their comments when moving away from Reddit to… Surprise! Lemmy.
Back during the big move people made a lot of scripts and apps to do that for them and my unpopular opinion is that its been not a good thing to do. Unless they archive their answers somewhere else it is lost knowledge. I know I am pretty alone with that view so please don’t start a discussion again, I won’t reply.
Yeah, I get so pissed when people nuke their comment history. Why do that when you don’t have too much of personal revealing information in that post or comment? Even one of the mods of AskHistorians expressed frustration of insightful posts and comments being deleted by OP. I did not even delete any of my posts before I deleted my Reddit account, because there are no revealing information, and I know some of my posts and comments will be helpful for others.
You may disagree with the net effect of the decision, but the decision is not hard to understand. The people that are doing it are placing a larger value on harming Reddit as a platform to hopefully force corrective change or encourage movement to competing platforms. You place a larger value on preserving knowledge.
You say you get pissed. My question is do you get pissed at the person who deleted it, or do you get pissed at Reddit for alienating it’s own users to the point of deleting their own comments?
I have just read other people’s comments as to why Redditors delete their comments. But even before the enshitiffication, I and others find it frustrating when comments are deleted.
I do too. But I blame Reddit for that, not the users.
Don’t look at what’s been happening with the stock price.
I’m trying to get the image of spez wanking to that price graph out of my head.
censorship and being censured as well.
When Twitter went downhill, we got bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky works as a decent Twitter replacement and Mastodon is smaller and more fediverse-focused. Lemmy and Piefed are alternatives to Reddit but I wouldnt really say that Lemmy fully replaces Reddits functionality in terms of niche subs. That’s why I’ve always been in favor of explosive growth here with each Reddit exodus, to have a forum within an order of magnitude or two of the size of Reddit to properly become a replacement.
good, but it’s not enough
The comment says removed, but the user says deleted.
And because of the large number of people who not only left Reddit, but burnt bridges in doing so by using tools to delete or garble their entite post history, it’s hard to tell if this was Reddit’s doing or just that of a fed-up user who deleted their own posts when leaving the site.
it’s hard to tell if this was Reddit’s doing or just that of a fed-up user who deleted their own posts when leaving
The latter, Reddit doesn’t remove your comments and posts when your account gets deleted.
I used a tool to overwrite mine right before the API bullshit went into effect, but searching for my account, it appears they were all restored.
I overwrote all my comments, then deleted them, and they’ve been restored as well. Anyone know a working tool to permanently delete stuff?
Give your account to a European user and have them order Reddit to delete everything via gdpr.
There is none.
I’m not going to post links and supporting evidence, I can’t be bothered.
But creators and admins have gone on the record saying you never ever can remove or delete a comment, and every edit is saved. And furthermore, they just restore comments at their whim.
Yes and no.
Yes, they have every single version of every single comment you ever made and can fetch whichever one they want whenever they want.
But reddit is massive. That is WHY it depends so much on unpaid mods (like other social media sites of a much smaller size…).
So unless you are a “top influencer”, the most they’ll do is revert your deleted comments maybe one extra version. So if you use one of the tools that edit it prior to deletion, you are in good-ish shape.
Which is what we saw during the “protests”. Plenty of people (self included) saw their comments come back. But the people who ran one of the editing deleters (with a non-default message) saw their edited messages return. Because that was the most recent on the stack.
That’s what I’ve noticed.
I initially used power delete suite which got maybe half of mine.
Then I went and started manually editing them with random words.
Then started deleting.
I’m very sure that some sub’s have restored deleted comments. Amusingly sometimes with the random words instead of the original.
The only reason I never deleted my account is so that I can go back and mess up or delete stuff as it comes back. Fairly easy to find your comments with a search of your username.
Surprised they haven’t just locked the ability to edit or delete older stuff. It’s not like it ever really gets deleted, just removed from public view.
They repeatedly restored deleted content during the “protests”. Which is why most of us encouraged people to leave their accounts open to go re-wipe when Reddit corporate stopped caring.
But now the API-based tool i used no longer functions
Rate limited so you might have to run it a few times over the course of a week but https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
yea it doesnt, unless you were shadowbanned. if you got permabanned or delted your account your history isnt gone. shadowban however gets all posts hidden by other users, except yourself.
a fed-up user who deleted their own posts when leaving the site.
9 times out of 10 that is also Reddit’s doing.
tools to delete or garble their entite post history
I had a 6 year account when the API scandal hit. Paid a small fee to deny reddit whatever 2 cents my comments are worth.
13 years for me. I killed so much content.
I know I deleted all my posts from multiple accounts before coming here.
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
Use bad words like sex, porn, diversity, gay, for maximum effect.
DEI, trans, equal rights, tump fucked kids.
