Three Things You Should Do Before Deleting Your Reddit Account

lostwonder@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 67 points –
Three Things You Should Do Before Deleting Your Reddit Account
lifehacker.com

The steps to deleting your Reddit account

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I was a piker and just hit the delete button without doing any of these things. Did I lose some history that, in retrospect, I might have wanted to revisit...honestly, no! I never went back and visited my old posts and (and I'm embarrassed to admit this), none of them were likely to have any value to future generations.

Some people post great, information rich posts about how to debug .NET applications or defuse nuclear weapons. I think my greatest contribution to Reddit was making a pun that once got 54 likes.

The important thing to remember is to delete your Reddit account (and hope that AskHistorians comes to the Fediverse eventually!).

The problem with deleting is that they can still harvest your data, you want to use a script to overwrite everything if you truly want it gone

https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit

If they want to keep our data, realistically nothing we can do will stop them.

I had the same mental debate when I deleted my Facebook account years ago and realized I just don't have any power in this situation. I am deleting things mostly for my benefit; it's symbolic, like throwing away the remaining pack of cigarettes. That act by itself does nothing, but it sure doesn't hurt my chances of actually kicking the habit.

In this case, even if the data is still buried somewhere in Reddit's servers, if enough people do the same it will destroy any "value" that Reddit has left as a company. Trying to undo all of that would be a massive, likely impractical undertaking that I'm comfortable betting simply won't happen.

At the very least, you can edit all of your posts to advertise a lemmy instance hahaha.

Same, I have not exported anything, just delete thousands of comments from 13 years

Same here. No saving. Power delete suite to edit, then wipe it all

404

Step 4. Delete your lifehacker page that mentions you once had a Reddit account.

A part of me wants to kinda salt the earth and hopes that there will be a data shredder script that doesn't delete all comments, but instead uses ChatGPT to bloat all of them up to maximum comment length. No idea if this has a considerable effect on data size on the server. But I would be happy just imaging that it does.

A more harmless and funny approach could be to instead to just push the original comment through several iterations of translations and dialects till the original comment becomes nonsense.

The non-confrontational part might be just numb to all the corporate greed making stuff worse and is just trying to enjoy this new experience instead

Who has the best rick roll for the first stage edits?