I deleted all my post from my reddit account, can they still monetize them?

vestmoria@linux.community to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 33 points –

Deleting a post is simply marking a piece of text so nobody sees it, but I think the text is still stored in their servers.

Furthermore, a large company like reddit, must backup regularly, meaning there must be several copies of my posts in several SSDs. If the backup once a day… some of my posts are 5 years old.

Companies exist to make money. I suspect they just marked my posts not to be readable by anyone, except staff and they can still monetize them.

Am I wearing a tinfoil hat way too often?

22

I've been meaning to ask this elsewhere but I guess I can piggyback off this post-

What tool(s) are available for deleting/removing your post history? I've seen mention that some didn't delete their posts but had a bot or something replace the text in them with some text about leaving for Lemmy, and I'd like to do something like that myself.

I used Power Delete Suite but I had to modify it a bit to put in a delay of about 30-45 seconds for each comment as I was editing the text for each one prior to deleting.

Took quite a while, but in the end my account was gone. I'm sure reddit could pull stuff from it if they really wanted, but no user facing options exist - even "deleted reddit comment viewers".

Edit: I will say that I'm unsure if this still works (or any editing tools) because of the API changes.

Seems to be working great, thank you!

Awesome! Make sure to double check some of the comments that they were all updated/deleted. Without a delay mine has trouble and missed a few

I haven’t kept up with anything reddit wise but I thought those tools utilized the now inaccessible APIs unless they’ve figured out how to do it without them.

My understanding is that the moderator workaround is still working for unfettered access to the API. I was hoping there was something I could just set to do the purging for me on an idle computer.

I've seen mention that some didn’t delete their posts but had a bot or something replace the text in them with some text about leaving for Lemmy

Let's say you made a comment on rexxit, then went back to fix a typo, saved the change, then noticed a missing word and went back to fix that. You've had three 'different' comments: original, typo fixed, final.

The way rexxit worked was that it only saved your current comment, plus the most recent previous version. After you fixed the typo, they had your original comment and the fixed-typo version in their database; when you replaced the missing word, they deleted your original comment from the database, moved the fixed-typo version to the 'backup' field, and put the final version in the 'visible comment' field.

People who deleted their accounts and wanted to make sure their content was gone, can scripts that replaced the original comment with a temporary comment, and then either deleted their comment or replaced it with a final comment - meaning that rexxit lost the original content that was valuable to them, and the user was sure their content was removed.

During the API Wars, some people just deleted their original content and then later saw it re-appear; the speculation was that rexxit was restoring deleted content. This was particularly annoying for people who deleted their content and then deleted their accounts, because they couldn't get back in the re-delete their stuff.

It's possible that rexxit modified their code to save an additional copy(s) of changed content; is possible that rexxit is no longer restoring content that got deleted en masse. But I'd suggest running something that changes your content, and then either changes it again or delete it, and then waiting before you delete your account.

Also, you're probably not going to be able to get rid of everything: rexxit only allowed you access to your 1000 most recent comments and 1000 most recent posts. I had to delete those, delete everything that had been gilded, and ... there was some other category that I specifically had to delete, but I don't remember what it was, sorry. I waited another week or so, them googled it username on rexxit and deleted everything it found (same thing on Bing/DDG), then repeated it s couple more times over the month or so that followed. I still find occasional content on the site, which is annoying.

Anyway, depending on whether you just want to send people to Lemmy, or want to screw over rexxit, just be aware that doing so fully may take a bit of effort. If it helps at all, I used PowerDeleteSuite.