I just spent all day today fighting with reddit, trying to get all my comments deleted/overwritten: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/45417/Anyone-have-experience-with-deleting-comments-to-see-older-comments#entry-comment-190482
It’s not just me, someone else reported the same, though using a different tool: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/46805/Strange-phenomenon-while-deleting-my-comments
Basically, reddit has the most ridiculous api ever! A 1000 limit on viewing … well basically anything. Try to go further back, and you can’t.
The tools and scripts and websites we are using to delete, they are hitting that limit and can’t go past it. My own reddit is only 5 years old and I hit this. I imagine that many folks where, the ex-redditors who had 12, 17 year old accounts, you probably didn’t get everything on your way out.
Unless of course, you had a data retrieval request made to reddit, and reddit responded with your data. Only then are tools like shreddit and websites like shreddit.com able to completely wipe out your history. Or else you knew about this somehow already and used an external manager like eternity - https://github.com/jc9108/eternity - to save a copy of your posts before they got lost to the 1k limit.
Worst of all, it’s explained that deleting items does not rebuild the list - so you can’t see the older stuff by deleting newer stuff.
I’m hoping that private/public transition is an exception to this and it’ll rebuild my lists when that happens. Maybe then I can go far back enough to delete everything.
Edit: Nope, someone confirmed in a comment below that this doesn’t happen.
Also looks like pushshift is not an option, as pushshift was shut down last month, https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13mhuzq/api_has_been_taken_down/ - and under the new deal, regular users won’t be able to use it when it opens up for business again, only approved moderators can (and likely only for approved reasons) if i’m understanding https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancing_communityled_moderation_an_update_on/ correctly.
I used Redact and afterwards, before I deleted my accounts, I checked to see if there were any posts/comments still showing up under my user profile and I didn’t see any. Account was over a decade old. Not sure if it really did kill everything, but even if not, it was close enough for my needs (a middle finger to the Reddit-man).
If you search…
"your username" site:reddit.com… you will probably find lots of comments that weren’t deleted, but don’t show up in your profile.
Cool. As long as the goal is accomplished.
That said the 1000 limit applies to your profile too. It will look empty but you can still have things that got missed, unfortunately.
AFIK, or at least as Reddit has said in the past, the 1K limit should roll backwards as you delete recent content from it. It’s a display limit to prevent data usage through scraping, not a hard limit on the database.
It’s a display limit to prevent data usage through scraping, not a hard limit on the database.
It’s neither. It’s an index limit. The older messages are still in the database, but they won’t appear in listings, because those are built from indexes.
I think I may be running into the index thing. I can easily find old, unedited comments of mine by using
site:reddit.com "username".My next move is to request my data from reddit which, as I understand it, should contain a list of comments in .json. I then plan on iterating through those and use PRAW to edit all of my comments going back 14yrs. Then I’ll delete my account.
This was my plan as well, but I’m worried that the request will only be answered after July 1st, and maybe the tools will break with the API changes that happen then.
Will that affect even small-time users like us who hardly ever use the API? That would kill things like the conversionbot, remindme, etc too.
That would kill things like the conversionbot, remindme, etc too.
Well, yeah.
Will that affect even small-time users like us who hardly ever use the API?
Maybe not. But we’d need to keep to under 100 API calls a day. So - say we get our archives from reddit in July, and then we manage to do some finangling to filter out the stuff already redacted by shreddit/redact.dev/whatever that we are doing now.Say we then have 33 comments left to redact. Or 22 comments, 11 posts. One api call to retrieve info about it (including content), one api call to edit to overwrite, and one api call to delete. That puts us at 99 api calls.
I guess someone could modify shreddit so that when running on the archive, it does 100 api calls max, then sleeps whatever time period required, then wakes up with the limit reset. Might work, just take longer. But we’ll have to see.
I might need some help with this. When I try to run the script, it just tells me that there’s a 404 not found error trying to connect to pushshift, then it keeps retrying until it hits a limit and gives up.
Someone else on this thread mentioned that pushshift was down, seems to be backed up by https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13mhuzq/api_has_been_taken_down/ and https://stats.uptimerobot.com/l8RZDu1gBG
Just successfully deleted and overwrote all comments and posts using https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I went to r/pushshift and their sticky post has a link to request deletion of everything from pushshift.
Have not deleted all accounts yet. I’m waiting to see about porting pixel pal from apollo app and my main is good communication tool. Deleted a one off account that didn’t have an email associated with it. The rest I’m using as test to see if comments/posts return. They’ll be deleted soon.
I tried PDS from that same link. It didn’t do the job - I checked immediately afterwards and I had a bunch of stuff that it missed visible on my profile page.
Even when it works perfectly, it seems like it wouldn’t get everything - your profile only shows 1000 at most (in my case I see about eight hundred something since some of my more recent comments are hidden behind blackedout subs but it would be one thousand otherwise). And PDS just deletes from your profile, so if you can’t see it there, then PDS can’t get it.
My largest account was 10 years, over 3000 comment, and over 500 posts. It missed one post out of everything. That got missed when I closed my laptop to grab the peeing 3 year old. When I opened it up, it restarted but reported the error on that one.
It does not delete saved posts/commments, hidden, upvoted, and downvoted.
500 posts is under the limit so that makes sense.
For the comments, since the oldest ones don’t show up in your profile anywhere, how did you verify that PDS deleted them?
I have not deleted the account. I can login. I’m awaiting my pushshift confirmation and going through manually scrubbing saved posts and comments. Saving some recipes and other shit. I’m keeping an eye out for the reinstatement of comments if it happens.
I’m awaiting my pushshift confirmation
Can you elaborate more on this? If there’s a way to get pushshift access, even if just temporarily and for a short time, this would be really great! I could finish running the PSAW script and wipe everything now.
I have not deleted the account. I can login.
I know, you said this.
I’m keeping an eye out for the reinstatement of comments if it happens.
Sorry to be a bit thick here. This makes it sound like you didn’t have a way to verify the older 2000 comments are gone and were just assuming that they are gone because your profile doesn’t show anything.
Again, sorry to be a bit pushy here. It’s just that, if PDS can really do this, bypass the 1000 index limits, then I am willing to give it another try (and maybe share some fixes since it seems to be broken on my browser).
But I’d rather not waste my time if that’s not the case. So a confirmation (about the ability of PDS to bypass the 1k limit) would be super helpful!
After plan B (pushshift) failed (due to pushshift being down), my plan C also failed (I saw the pushshift torrent on archive.org but it’s too huge for me to grab).
But I found a plan D - my earliest comments were restricted to just three or four relatively small subs across six months, and someone posted on how to download just the dumps for specific subs in specific year-months.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684
https://academictorrents.com/details/c398a571976c78d346c325bd75c47b82edf6124e/tech&filelist=1So I’m going to try and download the relevant files (much smaller, only teens of MB compressed), search for my own comments, and feed them to a script for overwriting… With this I think I’ll have even my oldest comments covered.
and going through manually scrubbing saved posts and comments. Saving some recipes and other shit.
How many of these did you have? I never saved anything (didn’t really know about the feature until after the blackout) but supposedly it has a 1000 index limit as well.
Others have been reporting that their deleted or shredded comments are restored the next day. Are yours actually staying deleted up to the 1000 limit?
I checked and so far nothing has come back that I deleted/overwrote. But it’s like 24 hours or something so maybe still too soon to be sure.
Only stuff past the limit and stuff on subs that are still private/going public after I ran, so far.
I can certainly attest that Reddit is not restoring 100% of those edit-for-purge cases, there’s been a couple users run those in communities I mod and those edits have remained in effect a few days later.
Honestly, what’s really important to me is that my top stuff was deleted, rather than all the other horseshit I posted day to day on reddit. As much as possible would be good, but what I really want is to leave behind holes in major discussions, turning the place into Emmentaler. Thankfully, this is my third account wipe so I’m not that worried.
Edit: Plus I haven’t actually deleted my account yet and continually run a delete script every time I see comments come back. Hell, I cleared it out early today manually at work while I had free time.
That’s what I just got done doing. Submissions sorted by Top, deleted. Comments sorted by Top, deleted.
I’ve used all four methods - new, top, hot, controversial - and each one brought up new stuff that got missed by another category. After that I used google - and that brought more stuff that got missed by all four. I see why at this point most people would say, “good enough” and call it a day.
