this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Nuking old Reddit accounts (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I took part in the Reddit blackout a month ago, and accessed Reddit through Apollo. After the blackout I looked at Reddit a handful of times and then let my association with Reddit die with Apollo.

I haven’t been there since, but now I feel as though I should have deleted my account of 7 years, that way everything I ever contributed will be gone.

However, to accomplish this as you all know I should delete all my posts first and edit all comments. I was wondering what people used to do this. I want everything to read “Edit: moved to Lemmy”.

I’m sure others migrating here have the same question. Thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I used Power Delete Suite. It does work fine with one caveat: It'll only action on posts/comments that are displayed in your Reddit user profile.

You'd think that's enough but I'm pretty sure Reddit's own backend database is broken. There are definitely posts/comments within Reddit that are yours but won't display in your own Reddit profile. Like I think for older accounts sometimes posts/comments get disassociated from your profile page & you won't see them anymore unless you search around in reddit.com or via google.

For example before I deleted anything I did a backup using Power Delete Suite. Now that my Reddit user profile is mostly empty I am still finding old comments using the standard reddit.com search, & I can still edit/delete those manually even though they do not display in my Reddit profile. And interestingly they don't appear in my backup file that was created with Power Delete Suite - Leading me to believe that these comments exist in Reddit's database but somehow got detached from displaying in my main Reddit profile.

.. so depending how you want to go about it, maybe don't close your Reddit account right away. You may need it if you want to search for & edit/delete posts/comments that don't display in your Reddit profile.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Power Delete Suite will allow you to edit your posts with the message of your choosing and then delete them. Idk if it'll let you edit them without deleting them. The edit feature is to create a new entry on the database in case reddit isn't actually deleting comments from their database when they show as deleted. Although if they're doing that then they probably keep a change log of the comments as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Idk if it’ll let you edit them without deleting them.

Yup it does, that's how I used it. Did a cycle to edit with random words, afterwards checked if it worked & if it looked okay went ahead with a delete.

The edit feature is to create a new entry on the database in case reddit isn’t actually deleting comments from their database when they show as deleted. Although if they’re doing that then they probably keep a change log of the comments as well.

You know I thought that too. But I've seen some people talk about their GDPR data requests & they received the last edited version of their posts/comments, not the original. The data request doesn't even contain anything like a change log of every post/comment. But I guess you could argue the data request is fulfilled with just the last version regardless of how many versions of the same post/comment actually exists.