I came across today one of my own comments on Reddit with a search on duckduckgo. It was still intact. The problem is I used shreddit to randomise and delete the entire contents of my account. My account comments and posts all show empty on my account pages on reddit so there should be nothing.
I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them. Its curious that they don’t appear on my accounts content on Reddit and yet a search engine can find them and they are still served by Reddit. Ex Reddit users who deleted their account contents should be aware this is happening and report it as a GDPR breach to their respective agencies if they are in the EU if they too find this has occurred.
It’s not you It’s reddit profiles, they don’t show more than the top N posts in whatever sorting order
You can delete everything in /user/new, then sort by “top” and notice there’s still stuff there. There is no way to list it all and delete it all. And if you delete the whole account to at least anonymize the comments, they might bring stuff back (that you deleted) and there’ll be no way to remove them anymore.
As I mentioned, I went through the whole process a month ago, when I did see this exact behavior and I understand it perfectly. Right now, though? Why wouldn’t it show up at all? After a month with my account mostly empty, I’d expect to be able to see such comments. Yet, no matter how I sort it all, I don’t see those comments.
When you edit or delete your content, it remains in Pushshift (the database) and all that changes is the access. This is the way it has been for years, and why you could easily view moderator removed comments via Ceddit, Unddit, Reveddit, and the like. User delete and moderator remove are just hide buttons for the content.
Keeping that in mind, how hard would it be for Reddit to fuck around with that hiding just a bit more so as to not lose its content: not hard at all, as easy as mass approving comments when admin unbans someone (this is a frequent complaint on r/modsupport, lol).
When Reddit restricted the API, they restricted the ability to view hidden data via making calls to Pushshift, but that does NOT mean the backend has changed at all.
Anyone facing this problem should look at r/reveddit, where its creator u/rhaksw has urged people to continue viewing their own data via Reveddit even though they cannot now see everyone else’s because of the API restrictions. He explains it a lot better than I could, and how to get your own API key.
EDITED TO ADD (and remove direct Reddit link):
https://teddit.hostux.net/r/reveddit/comments/1502sb3/temp_fix_to_continue_using_the_extension_acquire/
YouTube short on how to get your own Reddit API key: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ogv3ZU6dg
There are those of us using our GDPR data request output with shreddit or redact.dev, and that bypasses the profile altogether, as the .csv tells shreddit or redact what to delete.