Reddit Undeleted all my posts and comments

gedaliyah@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 511 points –

Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn't planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I'm not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that's a bit concerning. There's no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail's-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.

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The API-based deletion tools usually have to be tuned to delete posts slowly enough to not trigger Reddit's abuse detection. Otherwise, they'll automatically undo bulk changes like that.

There's no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail's-pace reddit UI

This is, unfortunately, the only way to guarantee that your posts stay deleted. My account was 15 years old. I still log in every few weeks or so to go manually delete more comments. It'll be a while.

I had to fiddle with my own on my old laptop, I used one of the plethora of github scripts, but then they changed the api to limit access to (I think) about 100/min, so I just changed the delays to 1000ms so it would only delete 60/min.

Took two weeks, but I still haven't seen any old content pop back up outside of archives and quotes from other comments in the thread.

I search for a couple random things I remember saying on ddg/bing/Google whenever I think about it, so far nothing.

As I've said before about certain countries, you know your platform is doing well when you (essentially) tell people "No, sorry, you can't leave."

I got permabanned so I can't even delete my shit :/

(For anyone curious, it was for suggesting that riot police should quit their jobs en masse following RvW. I still stand by that statement)

My account was "permanently suspended" for "mod abuse" because I reported misinformation in r/conservative.

dude that sub is almost as easy to get banned from as pyongyang. they bitch about snowflakes but are all half melted snowflakes themselves. absolute dumpster fire of amalgamated fragile masculinity. NEETs, incels, and racists only.

That's the thing, though: I'm not talking about being banned from the sub. My account was suspended site-wide because the snowflake mods reported me to the admins for "abusing the moderation system" (again: for reporting comments as misinformation because they actually were, in factual reality, misinformation), and the admins upheld that suspension even on appeal.

Reddit's admins actively support spreading fascist misinformation

I pissed off a power mod and got banned from a handful of subreddits and accidentally posted on one of them with an alt. Both accounts permabanned for ban evasion - even though one of those subreddits was one I only ever posted on with one account. Alts get nuked as soon as I make a single post anywhere, too.

Could get around it with a new email and IP but meh

they detect alts by IP? that's super reliable....🙄

They use machine learning to detect ban evasion. It takes into account email/phone used to sign up, IP, device fingerprinting, and behaviour on the site.

I had a site-wide, week-long ban for saying that Nazis who got punched in the face deserved it. Fuck that place, lmao

Well I personally think your ban might be deserved. I don't think anyone deserves to be punched in the face for what they believe. A punch in the face might only be deserved for something they do. Depends on the situation I guess.

Idk that we need to let Nazis do Nazi things before using violence to stop them. If someone makes a serious credible threat it's ok to stop it with violence.

My first site ban was for “it’s always a good day to punch a Nazi”

My second was for “fuck /u/spez”

My permaban was for dropping the “you like that, you fucking ” reference in an amusingly appropriate thread, and the mod who did it just wasn’t having the “i thought it was a hilariously topical meme reference in the context of the post, but I completely understand and will stay completely away from that term in the future” (it was probably the only time I had used the word in an interaction in, like, at least 5 or 6 years)

At any rate, the moderation here is overall much more sensible, imo.

Wait so if you get banned you can't even access your own information anymore?

Same but my ban was for talking about piracy in /r/movies and then accidently posting there again months later on one of my alt accounts.

Mine was for arguing with the BreadTube mod after he banned me for asking "Once you get rid of polices what's the plan exactly? A burglar enters your house, what then?"

Why would there be burglars in a post scarcity communist society, genius?

I’m banned from reddit permanently. But I suspect my information is still there. Unsure what to do about it, aside from embracing the fuckedness.

Send them an email saying you want to exercise your right to be forgotten

If you’re comfortable mucking about in the dev console and have some aptitude for coding, it’s absolutely possible to reverse-engineer the browser calls thoroughly enough that it’s literally impossible for Reddit to tell serverside that you’re not accessing it through a browser. At that point, all you have to do is introduce some logic to loosely replicate human behavior (time-jittered, of course, as well as some varied activity windows), and you should be able to kick it off on a raspberry pi or some other low-power “I don’t care if it’s on for a few weeks” system and let it ride.

Yeah, it's easy enough for reddit to detect rapid edits over a 1-day period and just undo all of them. That seems to be the case here. The edits I did manually were retained.

I used Power Delete Suite (javascript IIRC, via Firefox, year ago) to edit and delete, and mine are still gone. Not sure if it is still effective.

Reddit is probably less and less tolerant about edits and deletions, now that they're full speed on selling our data. Still see plenty of deleted posts when I'm searching for things, which is... nice I guess (bittersweet).

They could just look 5+ years back, gauge the average rate of comment editing (with falloff for time since comment creation), take that as a standard, and pass that as a filter over any modern edits. You would literally have to edit slower than the average bear, especially accounting for older comments.

I’ve replaced all of my Reddit comments for the past year with AI generated nonsense. It seems to have stuck. I plan on going through all of my past comments but will spread it out over time so that it’s harder to restore.

IMO the key is making a post that writes gibberish but that is good enough to suck a user in to read it for a few seconds before they realize it is BS. That kills the user experience and poisons the site.

Not gonna lie, I was worried your second paragraph was going to turn into Mankind throwing Undertaker off of Hell in a Cell

I've been saying this from the start:

Any basic level competency backend team has change history on comments. Crack whatever jokes you like about Reddit but they at least have "basic level competency"

It's trivial for them to build some filters to detect mass changes and just fuckin roll them back.

If you post ANYTHING on ANY server you don't own: it's out there. For ever.

https://media1.tenor.com/m/OUzcn0WrxFEAAAAC/sandlot-forever.gif

I always assumed keeping a change history for comments would be cost prohibitive. I mean there are millions of comments and God knows how many changes.

But apparently it's not a problem to keep versions of them. It doesn't blow up the database?

If you're storing change deltas rather than whole copies of comments, the changes for all of Reddit should be far smaller than the comments for all of Reddit.

Even storing full comments isn't much more storage. Just consider it as another random comment from someone else. Doubt most people edit their comments so 95% of comments only have 1 copy. Hell they used (maybe still do) ignore edits in the first 5 min or something likely so people could fix typos/formatting before they start storing history separately.

So they keep the change logs. Just don't provide them for the users' benefit.

Sounds like what everyone else in all the spaces, does.

Each change is less costly to store than each comment, and the system processes millions of comments per day.

Yep. I just deleted my top comments and deleted the account. I wasn't a high fluting karma whore, but it was 15 years worth. I still open reddit accidentally often, and that site is for sure going for the generic social media route. Such a shame.

Are you sure it was previously deleted stuff? I thought the same thing had happened to me but it was due to subreddits being private at the time of deletion then later coming out of private (some weeks or months later) preventing those then privated posts/comments from being deleted. I think running another automated tool again should do the trick at this point.

Also, there's non-rolling limit to how much shows in a user profile. All the delete/modify scripts I've seen work through the user profile, cycling each sorting method to access as much as possible. For old accounts, or just ones with enough activity, there's going to be shit not visible there. Have to search with other means if you want to get everything in that case.

This is my problem. Account is 16 years old and I have nearly 500k karma.

There might be something to this. I went and checked just now, prompted by a your comment, and I found a handful (like, six) comments from ages ago on reddit that did not get torched when I did my mass edit-and-delete, somehow. I found these mostly because some punters found them and necroposted on those threads, so I have notifications regarding them.

I found a few more and deleted those by hand, too. Most of them were from the same sub, so that sub was probably locked when I did my mass delete.

It seems to be undeleted. I confirmed that everything was gone at that time, and I am seeing no obvious pattern so far. I could be mistaken, but that's how it appears.

wouldn't this be against gdpr??

I'm not a legal expert, hence the question: isn't GDPR about personal information? Name, IP, physical and email addresses, etc. I don't think reddit comments fall into this category, maybe with the exception of particular comments with particular personal information.

it would feel under the right to be forgotten and the data deletion request parts of gdpr

I think that only applies once you've actually submitted a GDPR deletion request, not when you use a tool to edit comments.

Are you a resident of the EU? If so, I believe you have the legal right to demand that reddit delete all of your data and user content, and by law they must comply.

If you are a US citizen, I believe you have very little recourse in forcing them to delete your data, unless you are a resident of California or Virginia.

They'll usually process GDPR requests for anyone at these hacked together tech companies. It's not worth the dev time to build two separate flows

I wonder what the legality of transferring ownership of the account to someone in the EU in order to request gdpr enforcement would be... Or I suppose you could become an EU resident but that would be rather difficult.

Most likely you could just hit it from a proxy and say you are from the EU.

Actually, the GDPR applies to EU citizens no matter where they are so you shouldn't have to make your request from the EU for them to have to believe it

I had a similar issue. I had probably two million comment karma spread across about a dozen accounts. My first account was quickly auto-banned from several subreddits as soon as I started editing old comments. Those pro-spez mods had seen what people were doing during the exodus, and set the automod to ban those who tried.

Then I did the same with my second, third, fourth, etc accounts. All of those were immediately site banned for ban evasion, because I was interacting with subs my first account had just been banned in. So none of the edits on those later accounts were pushed through.

Reddit later un-banned those accounts, and all of my old comments were visible again. Likely to make the old comments show up.

Every time this gets brought up, I go back to a thread where my most popular comment was (since I no longer have an account to check back on and it's the only one I know for sure I can find). To this day, it luckily still remains deleted. If it does get restored, I wonder if it becomes the original comment or the generic [deleted in protest of the Reddit API change] or whatever I set them to be edited to before deletion.

Just wait till you hear how Lemmy "deletes" things. Illegal revenge and child porn, genocidal hate speech, everything is stored forever and in some apps, not even obscured.

Yeah, I've mentioned elsewhere that the fediverse is far worse. Lemmy is among the worst activity pub implementations in this regard, and they are all pretty fundamentally flawed.

Federated platforms are by nature trickier in this regard. Even email is difficult to truly delete.

We as admin can very much delete your existence upon request or if we wish. I think they also make purging photo easier too. Federated content though, that's a different thing.

To be far, anything posted to the internet is there forever.

Then again, that doesn't mean Lemmy can't improve

On a plus side, maybe, if you choose to delete your comments and posts again, albeit slowly, would be to copy/paste the really useful shit to Lemmy. I say this because one unintended (or not) consequence of these actions is that posts from years ago, explaining the solution to a problem that still pops up now and then, doesn't have the solution most of the time.

I don't disagree with the sentiment or actions at all, it just sucks when you find someone having the same issue you are, only to learn it's on reddit and the solution to said problem was deleted.

Yes, I'm considering this. Since I will have to go a few at a time it seems, I should be able to leave individual comments.

That would be pretty boss of you. Thanks for being helpful on the past and considering leaving that help available to all!

::6 months later::

Reddit announces users need to log in to view posts and comments

Fffffffffff

If you are from EU, you might try envoking the GDPR maybe? Though most make it incredibly difficult afaik

I just checked and Reddit did the same with my account. I spent hours editing and ultimately deleting my posts and comments, and the Spez Gestapo just undeleted years worth of content. I'm going to go through them again and this time I'll leave the gibberish.

It's one of the reasons I never deleted my account there every time my stuff pops back up I trounce it down again.

Speaking of which, I just checked and YEAH, not everything I ever posted is back, not even all the highest rated stuff, but a lot has come back and deleting more than a few at a time starts throwing errors :)

I just only did the first step: replace all I had written with random gibberish. And then I did nothing. Just left it there. And the gibberish is still there. Mission accomplished. One of the goals of this method was to feed KI with Nonsense. Obviously I wasn’t the only person who did so. And it looks like it has worked.

Actually using AI gibberish for this might be the best strategy of all, since Reddit seems hell bent on making money with AI training and feeding AI generated text into AI training has been shown to yield increasingly worse results over time. So you make the product Reddit is selling less attractive.

I've been doing the same thing, went back to read it now, and I have to admit I had a good time. Even though it took time to manually turn my comments into gibberish, it gave some hilarious results!

That may be worthwhile... But very time consuming.

Same thing like you did. The difference is I only edited the content and then I just left it. Deleting everything leads to reddit undeleting it. Leaving the Nonsense there did not trigger their alarm.

Huh. I lost 50k in points post-APIgate. So they undeleted some, and deleted others?

50 thousand points… were they gonna let you trade them in for something?

lol, a decade + on Reddit before the API debacle. It all adds up. I don’t care about them, it was just a “huh, wonder where they went…” kind of thing.

that's how I felt about my points too. just like a fun little tally of my time. gave literally zero shits if they went up or down.

You should delete your account. It can't be used again on Reddit (unless they change their policy). If you're worried about being identified, then it's better to just delete the account anyway than the alternative.

They appropriated /u/borat. It was an inactive account which was removed and given to the producers of the film to use for an AMA when it was released.

spez, kn0thin, and reddit the company as a whole have zero scruples. There are no rules but what they say at any given moment. It's subject to change at any time.

Like I said if they change their policy (even for a user) and allow someone else to use it, it is better than having all of your identifying information tied together under a username.

I find it very funny to think of how aggressively Reddit was banning people, particularly back in 2016. And how algorithmic they got in censoring and shadowbanning certain comments and accounts.

But now that real human interactions are more valuable than gold, they're trying to reverse it all again.

Ohhhh wow, they did the same thing to me! What absolute scumbags.

Edit: I'm going to explore the use of Power Delete Suite once I get home. This is total bullshit.

I used power delete suite last year. Just checked and most of my profile is back. Assholes.

Lol, a couple times I commented whenever this came up that it was probably pointless deleting like this with the random words and what not because reddit was likely doing some form of versioning or backups of at least the text based content. Especially since said content was/is under inflated executive value because "AI"

I got downvoted routinely because "ThAT WoULd Be Too ExPeNsiVe anD CoMpLiCatED, no WaY thEY dOiN tHaT"...if what you say is true with the true random words and everything, then I was right and they're doing exactly what I thought they'd do lol

It's a differential backup.

Super goddamn common. People who aren't tech literate should pipedown.

It's a nothingburger amount of effort to restore backups in most cases lol.

I knew it was a possibility but I didn't think it was likely. Well, here we are.

Thanks for bringing this up. I double-checked to make sure mine are still deleted.

Of course, nothing is truly deleted. I'm speculating they'll train AI with our deleted content anyway.

I’ve been planning for my content to be read by AI since 2010. Every time I wrote anything, I kept in mind it would be read by AI in the future. My entire account there was designed to teach AI to be good.

If you live in the EU at least, I’m pretty sure much of this outright evil stuff Reddit is doing is illegal. If you want to delete your account and comments, they have to let you.

This may be a little bit offtopic, but is there any way to archive my comments/posts in an offline file with links to the original thread if I want to see them again before I delethe them?

I'm also interested in this. Haven't gotten around to deleting my stuff. Some of the things I've posted over the years can be useful to me, so I wanna keep them.

You used to be able to request all of your reddit data - I did that and I guess I have a file somewhere. I couldn't tell you what's in it - I've never been motivated to check.

Yeah, they (used to) send ya a csv with all your posts/comments. Got mine before I overwrote and deleted, 17 years worth. I trained an llm on it. It may or may not be writing this.

I edited and deleted my comments, and then got banned. I figure they're not going to resurrect potentially tainted comments for training AIs.

I think the smarter thing would've been to start posting AI generated content

What happens if you create a fake community that only posts fake ai posts? Who is gonna ban you? It’s a genuine question

Nothing, because that doesn't cost Reddit short term money so they don't care?

But you can fill up reddit with the most insane shit and they will train AI on it, both reddit and google.

The fact that they are restoring valuable comments and posts means that they need them. But what if the most knowledgeable people on the platform go crazy? It is illegal to conspire against companies?

I don't think that could be done at a scale that matters, because it doesn't make you any money.

TBH the bigger threat is the corporate bots that already post in "human" subs. They're destroying the site already, but Reddit doesn't really care about that either, lol.

Yea, true probably…it would have been fun tho.

Instead of deleting everything, edit it to sometime else. Quick brown fox that shit.

That’s what the plugin they used did.

But all at once in a way that's obviously a bot. Just do one comment every now and then and you don't flag it that way.

This just happened to me as well. Deleted all my stuff about a year ago and even happened to check last week and it was still gone. Saw this and went back to check again just now, and it had all been undeleted.

Update: just realized it’s not everything, just everything more than 5 years old

If they're mass restoring stuff, they're probably chugging through in batches, betcha if you check in a couple weeks there will be more

does this happen to people that deleted their account as well?

Yep. I overwrote all my content and deleted my account, and the criminal enterprise known as Reddit violated COPPA by restoring it all, and now that the account is deleted, I can’t get back in to try again.

I know there are some databases of all Reddit comments prior to... maybe 2015? I forget. Would be cool to port them into an open source clone that isn't profiting off them, just for the times comments were really useful, like solving a tech issue only a couple people had ever documented.

At one time, Reddit (or at least the core server) was open source. Statistically, it's relatively likely that someone, somewhere forked and is maintaining that code for their own purposes to this day, but I'm not actively aware of any examples.

If someone has been maintaining a fork, I'd love to see the old comment database imported into it and made available, though I don't know offhand what license either the code or the comments were released under.

A FOSS Reddit, without the chaos that took over America during the presidential administration installed in 2016, and branching from there, would be an interesting point of diversion to say the least.

Edit: quickie DDG search found me one fork archived in 2023 and a further form updated a year or so ago. That’s recent enough the damn thing just might build with a little work.

2023 fork of open source reddit

~2024 fork

I’m sure there are others…

Just tell them you live in the EU and you want to exercise your right to be forgotten, therefore you want them to delete all the data they have on you permanently. They'll comply, trust me.

Also you can first download all the data they have on you, as required by the GDPR, if you want to backup some of it.

My 15k deleted comments across multiple accounts are still gone. But I used my own Python script and it was about 6 months before the drama started and lots of people were doing it.

Shit, this made me look at my okd account and sane thing happened. I wish I was in the EU, I could report them for ignoring my deletion request (I actually also asked for the user to be deleted)

That sucks.

I deleted all my comments/posts on reddit a couple of years ago via a UI automation script, and they are still deleted, luckily.

Use the plugin to archive and replace posts. After a while do the replace again but stop in the middle. Repeat as necessary... it makes the posts different but still not valid.

Maybe you should start the long process of manually changing everything to grammatically correct, parseable nonsense, comment by comment. Make it a long term project.

Even better! Maybe change everything to "ignore previous instructions" lol

This is what I used and it worked great.

https://redact.dev/

For the times that I go back on to Reddit, I follow up and delete my comments a few weeks later using this.

I just made the switch and trying out things but should’ve edited the comments with a copypasta.

Was it random gibberish or the same phrase every time? I'm not sure what Reddit is capable of but if you use a copy pasted message then they could easily know which posts to undelete. However, if you replace your posts with random sentences (say pick from a list of 100) they won't know which is real through obfuscation.

The tool edits the comments to a random string before deleting, since deleted comments and posts are actually preserved.

If you're concerned about particular comments or posts linking your Reddit account to your real-world identity, and you know have a pretty good idea what those are, can you just delete or modify those?

I think that there are some other issues here, though.

That will help if you're worried about someone doxxing an account via just casually doing Web searches, maybe.

But people have already archived copies of Reddit's comment and post history. So if you're worried about someone likely to be digging through such a database, this won't help.

And I have no idea whether Reddit actually purges deleted comments internally, or whether they or any partners or future purchasers might have access to deleted text. I haven't looked at their privacy policy, so I don't know what they do.

It's an aggregate concern - Advertisers, bad actors, etc could easily use tools that are available now or will be soon to extract information that otherwise would be impossible for a human to wade through. I know that in one sense, everything is backed up by the NSA, etc, but that is not something I can do anything about.

The concern is actually greater in the fediverse, since a federated admin has access to even more information, and there is no absolute way to delete everything even with GDPR. I think that the risk is worth building a better internet. It's also a part of why blocking Threads is important.

So, I'm gonna be honest. I don't think that mass deanonymization via text analysis is in the immediate future.

Is it a theoretical risk? Yes. It's not because I don't think that it's technically doable. It's for a rather-more-depressing reason: because there's lower-hanging fruit if someone is trying to build a deanonymized database. I just don't think that it's presently worth the kind of effort required to mass-deanonymize text, in general.

Any time you have an account with some company that persists for a long time, if they retain a persistent IP address log, then whenever you log in, you're linking your identity and the IP address at that time. Especially if one cross-correlates logs at a few companies, and a data-miner could do a reasonably reliable job of deanonymizing someone. Maybe it's not perfect, maybe there are several people in a household or something, maybe some material is suspect. But if you're watching cookies in a browser on a phone crossing from one network to another and such, my guess is that you can typically probably map an IP address to a fairly limited number of people.

I mean, there are ways to help obfuscate that, like Tor. But virtually nobody is doing that sort of thing. And even through something like Tor, browsers tend to leak an awful lot of bits of unique information.

And if someone's downloading an app to their phone that's intentionally transmitting a unique identifier, then it's pretty much game over anyway, absent something like XPrivacyLua that can forge information. Companies want to get people using their phone apps.

An individual person might be subject to doxxing from someone who wants to try to identify their real-life persona from an online persona. But I don't think that companies will generally likely be going that route in the near future to try to deanonymize users en masse, because they've already got easier, more-reliable ways to track people that people are vulnerable to.

All that being said, once text is out there, it's potentially not going away, so keeping in mind that it might be deanonymized one day via future analysis might be a good idea. The Federalist Papers were deanonymized via Bayesian statistical analysis centuries after they were written using technologies that their authors could not have dreamed of.

Robert Hanssen -- a Soviet mole in the FBI who had counterintelligence expertise and could reasonably expect to be dealing with state-level intelligence agencies going after him -- was caught because he used the unique phrase "the purple-pissing Japanese" on two occasions; once where his real-life identity wasn't known but that he was a spy was, and once where his real-life identity was known but not that he was a spy. That deanonymization was done manually, via human effort, but if you figure that the same sorts of approaches could be used to link accounts at different services and across accounts on one service...shrugs I mean, I just don't have the tools to try to resist something like that, to keep what I'm saying intact but present ideas in a way that I'd be confident would be strong against that kind of analysis.

While I don't think that text analysis (TA) is going to replace those techniques that you mentioned, I do think that it is a threat to anonimity in the immediate future, because it'll likely be used alongside those techniques to improve their accuracy and lower their overall costs.

The key here is machine "learning" lowering the TA fruit by quite a bit. People misattribute ML with almost supernatural abilities, but here it's right at home, as it's literally made to find correlations between sets of data. And, well, TA is basically that.

Another reason why I think that it's a threat is because even a partial result is useful. TA doesn't just identifies you; it profiles you. And even if not knowing exactly your name and address, info like age, sex, gender, location, social class, academic formation etc. is still useful for advertisers and similar.

(Besides the Federalist Papers and Robert Hanssen, another interesting example would be how the Unabomber was captured. It illustrates better how the analysis almost never relies on a single piece of info, but rather multiple pieces that are then glued together into a coherent profile.)

(Also sorry for nerding out about this, it's just a topic that I happen to enjoy.)