So it has now been over a month since I last used Reddit, and I’m now looking at deleting my account there.
However before I do so, I have heard of “poisoning” my comments and posts on there using automated tools, or mass deleting everything before actually account deleting.
So my questions are, is mass deleting or poisoning still worthwhile? And does anyone have any recommendations of tools or scripts to facilitate this? It’s not a massive account, but 3121 contributions is still too much to go through manually.
Thanks everyone!
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I’m with the “don’t waste your time” crowd. The value is already extracted and any backups render your efforts completely moot. Also, the small amount of people doing it is probably a lot of work for little impact.
What actually matters is getting off reddit and ending the conversations on that platform. The problem for AI is its need for fresh, real data and when reddit can’t provide that they’ll become as coveted as an out-of-date encyclopedia written by a bunch of angsty thirty year-old white dudes.
The only people inconvenienced by “poisoning” your old comments are actual humans who come across old threads through Google or whatever in search of helpful information.
When Reddit sells data to AI trainers or whatever, they sell their internal database. It’s got the deleted content in it still. So do the public archives that third parties have collected and made available as torrents.
Inconveniencing humans looking for answers hurts reddit by making it less useful
Its impact on Reddit’s business is absolutely negligible. A handful of people "poisoning* their accounts will not even register on their traffic monitoring. But the answers to questions or solutions to problems they may have posted over the years could help dozens or even hundreds of other people.
To me that tradeoff isn’t worth it. It’s throwing rocks at the armoured car driving past just to feel like you are doing something. The only one you have a chance or hurting is your neighbour.
I disagree. If it’s helping hundreds of people, then removing it makes hundreds of people less reliant on reddit, and if lots of people did that it would be meaningful. And even if it added up to nothing significant, that argument is basically like saying “since I’m just one person its ok if I litter, because my individual impact on the environment is negligible.” The morally correct thing to do is to not support evil, regardless of the size of the support.
It’s just sort of prisoner’s dilemma. Lot’s of people won’t do it. I’m just being realistic. And in the reality where the percentage of people who are likely to attempt to delete or “poison” their accounts is as miniscule as it is, it will have absolutely zero impact on the traffic Reddit receives. Yes, even if each of those accounts produced hundreds of Google hits. But maybe I am more concerned with preservation of information and helping people than spiting Reddit. What would be great would be for people to replicate the useful answers they made on Reddit on here so we can show up in searches and actually provide a valid alternative. In general I think we would be better off trying to build this place into something better than caring too much about our old Reddit accounts.
you sound like a ‘i only get one vote so it doesn’t matter if i vote”, person.
that’s not the best kind of person you can be.
I guess I just value the small and direct positive impact preserved information can have on the lives of others, and in this case I consider it a bigger gain than what the deletion would bring in the tradeoff. Maybe that’s evil, I don’t know.
Voting in elections is the exact opposite to that, at least in my eyes, and I always vote in state, local and legislative elections. In fact, I’ve been looking forward to this current election period for years now as maybe the tides are finally turning in Sweden and we can enact some change. Maybe.
Yeah, it would be ideal for people to repost any useful content to somewhere like the fediverse so it can still be indexed and findable.
Anyway, I’m personally still happier to have removed my contribution to their profits, negligible as it may be, even if it did mean losing information. Sorry to that dude who ran into the same tech problem as me and needs the solution I found 10 years ago!
I’ve heard too many stories about people using different tools to delete posts and comments just for them to be restored. I went through and just manually deleted everything. It took a while, but nothing was brought back.
Of course that could also just mean anything I posted wasn’t cool enough to restore…
deleted by creator
I used shreddit back in the day which used reddit api and gdpr files to rewrite and delete all comments based on the direct links provided by the gdpr files. Its hard to get reddit api key now. But, nothing got restored.
I think people who said their comments were restored used things like power delete suite which relies on comments it can see based on your profile on old.reddit. There was a limit to the amount of comments it showed like 1000. So it would delete 1000 comments and not show anything. But, then later repopulate the profile with the next set of 1000 after a few days.
So what they thought was reddit restoring comments might have been comments that hadn’t been rewritten/deleted showing up.
Yeah going down the manual seems to be the better way to go, the more research I do, the more I come to this same conclusion
as a datahoarder i would choose to not delete. it’s gonna be available to them for monetize anyway.
if you’re really going to delete them, please ensure you have backup of them before purging…
There is no point doing it. Reddit will have your old comments in their DB, and they can still train on it or sell it to others. At most, delete/edit creates a new version in their DB, the old data is still there.
Shreddit still exists as a docker image and can go about saving a scrambled version before it deletes, but in practice it doesn’t seem to work. They disappear from your account and you can no longer see them but if you search for your username on Google etc you can still get to the comments, so they are still available for search engines and AI. There is no way to remove the comments on Reddit, you can just choose to hide them from yourself!
Use power delete suite. Rewrite comments. You’ll have to run it a few times when you get an error. Then after checking to see everything has been rewritten use it to delete comments. This is so if comments get restored it’ll be with overwritten content.
Then check on your profile in a few days or a week to do the same thing for the next set of comments that appear.
I’m not sure if it has changed, but reddit had a limit of the amount of comments displayed on your profile. Like 1000? So if you had like 5000 comments you’d have to run the rewrite then delete process 5 times while waiting for a few days for the comments that didn’t appear before to show up in your profile.
Don’t delete your account. Just leave it dormant just in case there are comments that didn’t get overwritten and deleted that might show up on your account.
I mass-deleted all my posts and comments when I left. Of course they still keep the content behind the scenes and have already made their millions training their AI on it, but I still want to do what I can. I don’t want them getting more value from providing it to current users. Some people say they might un-delete them, but last time I checked they were still gone.
I used this: PowerDeleteSuite
Thanks! I’ll look into this one
After you run it and make sure everything is deleted do a gdpr request after it has been like 2 months to see what data is left. It’ll show comments that haven’t been removed or you might have missed along with links to those comments.
I used this and it “deleted” my comments from my own profile, but I found that the comments usually still exist on whatever posts they were on… So that tool is unfortunately almost worse than doing nothing as now I have no track for what comments actually exist.
I’ve come across redact.dev, anyone with experience using this service?
You might want to look in to the reputation of the developer (Saltman, I believe) if such things matter to you. I don’t personally know much, but it’s evidently pretty mixed; maybe even a deep dive there FWIW.
Another common problem I’ve heard about redaction tools in general is that if you delete your stuff all at once, and Reddit assigns you a positive internal value, then there’s a chance that they’ll later restore all your posts & comments without warning. Some people have mentioned that they worked around that by using a service that only poisons or deletes stuff in small batches over time. I’m also inclined to think that if your ‘poison’ message is too consistent, then it’s easier to spot, so a service that could substitute a list of vaguely-plausible text might be best.
Funnily enough, this might be a good time to use AI slop against the sloppers, so to speak. Let an LLM or whatnot create substitute material that fit your original contributions, while still being useless to anyone. XD
Thanks for the heads up on this!
I’m starting to think I may just do this manually over a couple of weeks.
I’m starting to think I may just do this manually over a couple of weeks.
Look in to the time frame involved in which others deleted their stuff. My concern is that if it’s too quick, Reddit may flag that and restore it.
