I found a plug-in for Firefox that deletes all posts and comments from your reddit account. (Power Delete Suite). Now I am in talks with reddit, to have them delete my account and data.
They say that all content will be disassociated when I delete my account but I had them confirm that they won’t recreate it when I have deleted it. They still say that they will retain the IP used for creating the account. Not sure if this is legitimate data redemption after I have asked for my data to be deleted according to GDPR?
I’m very much on the hate Reddit train but that also happened to me and I think I have an explanation.
I think those delete scripts have a hard time in deleting your posts and comments in subreddits that have since gone private. Then if the subreddit reopens (probably because they were forced by Reddit or something) then all the comments you made there “come back” and it appears that Reddit restored them.
At least when I deleted all the comments in my Reddit account I the checked in a few days and I have a few that came back and they were all from the same subreddit that was private for protest before.
The scripts only work from your profile, specifically it checks the New, Hot, Top and Controversial pages. Each of these lists (and some of them let you sort by time also) are limited to 1000 comments.
If you have an old account with lots of comments, you may find many of your comments don’t fit into these lists, and won’t have ever been deleted by the scripts. For myself, I kept a link to a couple of my old Top comments open, ran the script, then found the top comment had been deleted but my subsequent replies (old comments with small karma) were left untouched.
The only effective way to get these comments is yo use the direct comment links in a data access request. This data can be fed into some scripts, eg shreddit (the github version not the paid website version) and can automate it, however I’m not sure if these still work since 1 July.
As for comments being restored, supposedly this was because of reddit’s CDN structure. You’d delete it on one node, then another would restore it. This did not happen in my experience when deleting via the direct comment link, rather than from the profile pages, and I haven’t had any restored since the end of June.
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Shreddit also works the same as PDS when you don’t feed it GDPR CSV files. All of the tools work the same way more or less. Shreddit requires API access though while PDS uses old.reddit.com and scripts on the page.
Also when I did feed github shreddit with CSV files, it would “panic” and stop every so many links. Sometimes it would get through a few thousand, sometimes it would do just one. I kept having to edit the CSV files and delete up to where it got to and start again. All in all I think it took about 90 or so attempts, over about 2 weeks, but I got there in the end!
That’s not what’s happening here. I have used a script (not this one), it went through all my comments, overwrote them, and I checked my reddit profile and it was all gone.
Then, several days later, some comments were back again.
I ran the script again to delete those, and again reddit showed me that, in fact, they were gone. Only to have some of them reappear later… I think I ran that script about four times.
Now, I’m not saying this is intentional, because there was no rhyme nor reason which ones, though all of them were older and older every time I ran the script. I guess something in the backend of reddit isn’t working as intended, but it is, as a matter of fact, reddit who has copies of your comments and edits and reinstates them.