After 13 years, I had quit reddit 1st June 2023. At the time I joined beehaw (lemmy.world didn’t exist) and used the redact utility to delete all my posts/comments (we could at the time delete instead of mass editing.
I lurk sometimes some niche communities or go on reddit from google search, I never comment or upvote. I sometimes click on my user to see there was no comments/saved/etc.
Yesterday, randomly, I clicked on my username and saw all my 2023 and less post, 13 years of comments, I was like WTF, after 2 years, reddit decided to take an old backup or something and undelete all my comments!!!
As now redact only do mass editing and pretty slowly, I used something else, https://github.com/Jelly-Pudding/ereddicator/tree/main, followed instructions, it deleted ~3600 comments in less than 2 hours.
I’ll monitor from time to time if reddit keep undeleting them, to feed their AI…
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.
And authorized third parties too!
More like belongs to the shareholders and AI corporations
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.
No of course they are not really deleted, just a flag in their SQL database or something, but it’s still annoying…
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.
This. Every few months I go through and edit out batches of my old comments. All of them have stuck to this day.
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.
Add a “death to musk” comment, guarantee that one won’t be restored
Or just “Luigi”
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
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.
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
doesn’t seem very GDPR friendly
You could try a GDPR request. They are required to actually delete it permanently from their database and backups.
Doesnt GDPR just apply to the personal information sored on a website?
Doesn’t this just apply to Europeans in Europe? Reddit is in the US and all.
US companies must comply if they serve European customers. Reddit may make you try to prove you are European and deny it.
I believe under the CCPA which is a California law that is also strong and would also require them removing your data. It might apply to them even if you don’t reside in California since that is where they are based.
I went to check and yeah reddit undeleted all my comments and posts as well
Lemmy will also be crawled by AI so what’s the point now
At least no one’s profiting off that. I’m sure most just scrape reddit the same way but they’re still trying to charge people.
I believe that useful knowledge should be open and accessible to everyone for any reason (within reason of course, you might want to keep some things private), so I’m against your decision, but in the end you’re the owner of what you create so it’s your decision
You might answer “who asked?” and you would be right haha
so I’m against your decision
My decision to use Lemmy instead? I’ve already conceded that it’s going to be scraped. You want me to actively line Spez’s pockets or something?
My decision to use Lemmy instead?
No. Your decision to remove the content. It mainly harms those who will check the post later
Lmao I never removed my comments. Too lazy and too many accounts.
Good job with the reading comprehension.
You’re the one defending the mass deletion of past Reddit content…
The original post was about that at least. It pretty logical to assume you’re talking about the same thing
“How can you tell?”
AI: “Linux is good and capitalism is bad!”
“Ah.”
Lemmy in a nutshell haha
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
You could always send a GDPR request through a EU-based VPN.
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.
I went through and manually deleted all of my comments when I left; they’re all back again as well.
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.
