A few days ago I finally found inspiration to go back and delete all my content from reddit — 15 years’ worth.
I wrote a little script using PRAW to first go through posts then comments, fetching 1,000 at a time (the most the API supports per query) from each category and time frame, then deleting them. This appeared to work perfectly — I now have no comments or posts available when I log in and look at my profile, and my script no longer finds any via the API.
Then yesterday I got notified of a reply to one of my old comments. Clicking through, there was a comment I’d made a year ago, still intact. I confirmed it wasn’t visible through my profile then deleted it, but now I’m worried that much of my content might still be available without being visible in my profile.
Is there something I’m missing? I recall hearing during the API changes that some protections were being put in place to prevent users from deleting their content — have I bumped up against that? Should I just delete my account and forget about it? Would a GDPR request to delete all my data work?
Any insight as to what’s going on here would be much appreciated.
Many years ago I deleted all posts/comments that were listed under my user profile, but hundreds of them still show up when I use a search engine. I even tried going through all of those search results and deleting the comments directly from where they were posted. Doing that makes it look like the comments are being removed; you can even refresh the page and confirm that you don’t see them anymore, but after some time they always come back. I’ve done multiple cycles of trying to delete these comments and they never actually get removed.
Reddit is run by scumbags.