This doesn't work: Anyone have experience with deleting comments to see older comments in your profile on Reddit?

Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 5 points – 1 years ago

Edit2:

Okay, finally I am confident that I got them all!

Got a torrent client set up, and went to

https://academictorrents.com/details/c398a571976c78d346c325bd75c47b82edf6124e/tech&filelist=1

It turns out that you can just download individual subs. I know exactly which ones I first commented on, it was a small list and the subs themselves were pretty small too. So downloading just those subs from the torrent was pretty speedy and easy.

After that I came up with a quick script (based on the example scripts by the pushshift team's github) at https://github.com/Watchful1/PushshiftDumps

I was able to modify the super useful script at https://github.com/luphoria/reddit-migration one last time to accept a list of comment ids in a text file, and then overwrite them all.

Looks like I won't be needing that GDPR archive after all, thanks for nuttin reddit!!

Hat-tip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684

Edit: confirmed with someone in the PSA thread that this doesn't work. See https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/47320/PSA-If-you-have-more-than-1000-posts-more-than#entry-comment-200913

Original post below:

I'm having the same problem as the commenter here: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/41129/Just-started-the-process-of-editing-all-of-my-Reddit#entry-comment-180921

In my case I can see my comment history much further, but still about six months short of when I created my reddit account.

My post history seems go to back to my very first post, but I have a lot fewer of those.

For now I just edited my comments, but I'm wondering if I should also do a delete. If I delete say 400 of my newest comments, will I see 400 more older comments show up in my profile? And if so, how long will it take to refresh?

I'm willing to experiment and try and find out for myself, but was just curious if others had already experienced this.

(Of course, if it actually doesn't help - deleting new comments won't bring back the older history for me to backup and edit and delete - then I'd rather not delete anything at all and just leave my farewell message everywhere.)

I adapted this script to do what I needed, including printing out a count of comments found, as well as the permalink of each comment (so I could double check the date).

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/16226/Wrote-a-script-to-edit-all-my-posts

I have been deleting comments a few times a day. Every time I close the app and reopen it later, another sub has changed from private to public and I can see my comments in that sub available in my comment history. For me, however, I only see as far back as 2.months. I am on the Reddit app. I wonder if I would see older comments if I logged in on a computer. So far the comment history stops for me at 2.months.

Ah, I'm using old.reddit.com and checking on a desktop, so that might be the difference.

From my own experience, the comments (and posts) that have resurfaced are from those subreddits that have stayed in blackout, but are open at the time I checked.

Thus, and though this is me talking in hindsight, I've made a (bash) script that would execute Shreddit three times a day (via cron). I eventually would resort to manual deletion after June 29, but until then, I can rest easy that whatever resurfaces would get shredded.

Just to be sure though, I open Reddit on an incognito window (or even a separate browser I never used Rəddit on) and check things myself, usually by opening my profile page(s) and seeing if there's still any comments/posts left.

This is my plan as well, I think there's just one major sub left where I need to delete and they're going public (at least for a short time) next week. So I'll keep running.

Just ran a delete run and got 108 comments deleted. So far no older comments are reappearing but I'll check in periodically to see if they come back.

Edit: doing another run, after realizing the script was using comments.new() but i was seeing some older ones in comments.controversial() - so now trying that to see if i get everything.

Edit2: after that I had to load each post and manually proof it, I found a lot more of my comments unedited and manually edited each one. (For new() I didn't have to do, I double-checked the last couple and it seems every comment I made on the post was edited on the relevant post). But then I ran with hot() and top() and found even more comments. Finally, I followed the advice that someone else on this magazine suggested, and used google to search for my own username on reddit, and found even more comments to manually delete!

I'm really not feeling confident that I got it all.

So I had 2 new comments from hot and 367 new comments from top.

Now reviewing the posts for the last 100 of these. Some posts will have a top comment from me (just 2 points!) and then I'll find more posts with just 1 point that got missed and have to manually clear those out.

Definitely this did not get everything. There must be some posts where I added only one or two comments and never got upvoted or downvoted, thus they wouldn't show up in any of the lists. And search engines aren't turning up all of these comments either (I found that only the search engine reported, but I'm finding a lot of my comments on these posts which only had one of mine upvoted or downvoted).

On the plus side, this meant that downvotes helped me find content I otherwise would have missed. Downvoting is helpful! Who knew?