Exactly. Just used Redact myself a few weeks ago.

https://github.com/...

…or your moderators
…or your third party developers

As someone who deleted their posts... yes. The goal was to make Reddit worse, by removing my contributions to it because they forgot where their value came from.

My content had some small value to them. They didn't deserve it.

Reddit undeleted a lot of the content removed during the API debacle. This comment must have been after that because you can see the latest comment is post API changes.

The sad part of it is that they (reddit) can still access that deleleted information and sell it for AI training. Even as a "power" user you can use websites that "undelete" that content. The only ones truly affected by this are people randomly browsing reddit.

Yup, Reddit fucked us all after we gave them our knowledge for free.
Trick people into thinking they're contributing to a commons, steal the contributions and run. Very understandable that many people decided to retaliate after the betrayal.
I really hope decentralized knowledge bases take off. Aggregating niche knowledge from experts and non-experts everywhere the internet touches is such a valuable proposition!

I had like one useful comment posted to Reddit. I've left it up, and once every few months I get a comment being appreciative for the info.
Reddit gets the traffic because of Google indexing the original post of a user with the problem. People are going to visit it regardless of whether they'll find the answer or not. In fact, if they don't find it, they're more likely to keep browsing posts in the hope of finding something.

Reddit as a company is 100% unaffected by this

they want propaganda bots mostly now on reddit.

Good for whom?

There's been loads of times where I've looked everywhere for a solution, finally finding it on google page 10+ in an obscure reddit thread with like 10 votes and 4 comments where someone had found a weird, illogical solution to your exact problem, that actually worked.

It's a shame it went to shit. The real losers are us, we lost a lot of knowledge.

it’s hard to tell if this was Reddit’s doing or just that of a fed-up user who deleted their own posts when leaving

The latter, Reddit doesn't remove your comments and posts when your account gets deleted.

tools to delete or garble their entite post history

I had a 6 year account when the API scandal hit. Paid a small fee to deny reddit whatever 2 cents my comments are worth.

reddit comments only say removed when the mods or admins remove it. maybe the dude used a script to make all his comments say "I hate Reddit I am going to mail a pipebomb to carlos mencia in retaliation" and reddit nuked them.

I still use old reddit and I have an extension on iOS that modifies it to be usable on a phone. However, if old Reddit ends up getting the axe then I’m done for good.

They restored all my comments a few months later, so I've tried it again by editing all my comments to gibberish.

Fuck that pedophile wannabe.

Does that help the fight? I was under the impression that they got to keep all the old info

I used Redact a while back. Super easy. First replaced everything with filler text, then deleted. Just in case mods have auto-rollback for deletion.

You‘re harming people looking for help and support more than you harm Reddit.

What a spezhole

Can you post your app on GitHub? Many of us would love it. (Especially now if I ever need to visit the US I would have to delete all my JD Vance couch fucker comments)

I heard of a rumor; all of reddit was frequently backed up and available for download

I don't know about "available for download" (probably not), but: modern websites tend to have their content stored in a database, and databases are (or should be) regularly backed up to tape drive or optical disks or whatever. This means, fundamentally, that everything ever posted to a social media site like reddit or facebook will be in existence permanently, regardless of what efforts users take to subsequently delete their history from the current instance of the database.

The only way to truly "delete your data" would be to re-mount each old backup and delete the data in each of them before re-backing them up (or else destroying all the backups). No social media site does this or even could do this. Furthermore, when it comes to keeping your comment history out of the clutches of AI, I would almost guarantee that when a site like reddit sells its data to companies to train the AI on, they are selling old backups from before users started mass-deleting their posts.

There was pushshift, but it's locked down since the API thing, there's pullpush.io, but that seems down atm. Also there is reveddit. I think most or all of these do not store content that has been deleted by the user though.

I wonder what happens to your account when you get banned

They will just put them back. Your stuff isn't really deleted.

Even worse is: "Here's a link to where I found the solution"

404

What kind of a boy is spez?

Why? so it can be found in search engines when people are looking for answers? Sadly, Lemmy is terrible for searching for answers. Lemmy will likely never replace the true benefits of reddit, search engine indexing for solutions.

Welcome to "soft delete", where database entries are marked with a "deleted" flag instead of being actually deleted. Makes it trivial to restore things a user has "deleted". Actually, even without soft deletes, modern databases maintain an audit trail which tracks all changes made anywhere, which also makes it easy to restore "deleted" items. And actually actually, databases are regularly backed up and when a user "deletes" their data the sites don't go into the backups and delete the data there, so everything anyone posts is technically in existence forever (not really because because backups won't last forever but they can last a very long time).

I'm sure that when reddit sells its data to companies to train their AI on, they're selling backups from before users started mass-deleting their histories.

It's for alternate Reddit front-ends and rarely ever works.

So I get banned for reporting trolls because it's an "Abuse of the Report Button" AND they make it easier to Troll? Do they just want people not using the site?

you cant tell if people are botting/spamming

That's because the person who had the solution removed their comment history, but the person who said thank you didn't.

Edited with Power Delete Suite - https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

I do this every few months, scans the page, makes the changes. You can see with my account https://old.reddit.com/u/thermal_shock

Been about a month, will probably run it this weekend. Surprising I've only been blocked in some subs, no ban even though I said they all the billionaires should be killed lol

There were tools to do it for your... but after the massive migration they blocked a ton (part of the API block that drove everyone away)

if you google how to do this, you can find some threads, i used a github library that did it pretty easily with a step by step walk through, some let you edit it and fill with quotes or advertising or whatever.

I personally manually overwrite my comments every few months. Be aware, though, that you can see only the last 1000 comments in your history, so you'd better do it frequently if you are very active. I haven't seen any of my comments ever restored, unlike what I hear from people who use automated tools.

Use bad words like sex, porn, diversity, gay, for maximum effect.

And after that you chose Lemmy of all places? No offense, but the people and especially the mods here are even more batshit crazy when it comes to anything even remotely considered not left. 😂

I got banned from PoliticalMemes for saying that Hamas are a terrorist organization. Someone else got banned from the entirety of Blahaj.zone for saying that dragons aren't real. The list goes on. Reddit is centralist heaven compared to Lemmy! Heck, some of the mods are openly Putin and Winney Poo fan tankies!

That being said, there's still a lot of cool people and communities here that are pretty nice. Just stay away from anything even remotely political if you're not a downright communist/tankie. 🫣

Edit: The downvotes and comments below are once again proofing my point.

Edit2: Seems like I got myself another social stalker with this comment - CakeLova556@feddit.org

censorship and being censured as well.

When Twitter went downhill, we got bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky works as a decent Twitter replacement and Mastodon is smaller and more fediverse-focused. Lemmy and Piefed are alternatives to Reddit but I wouldnt really say that Lemmy fully replaces Reddits functionality in terms of niche subs. That's why I've always been in favor of explosive growth here with each Reddit exodus, to have a forum within an order of magnitude or two of the size of Reddit to properly become a replacement.

I forget the tool but every once in a while you'll see a comment of gibberish words and it says "comment removed thanks to X".

The service edits the comments instead of erasing them.

I mean, you can do pretty much that by using one of the largest instances. That is most likely to have content from the largest amount of other instances.

I provided quite a few answers in Linux, UNIX, and programming forums. I had to delete my comments multiple times as they kept getting restored. I even had a script that I'd run in my browser that would go through and delete all my posts until a month passed with no restorations, then deleted my account. Reddit should never be a Google result for tech help to begin with. It should take you to documentation.

Redlib (alternative front-end to Reddit) puts a link to undelete for removed comments. undelete.pullpush.io

I did this and found this.

MemeReserveBot couldn't reserve shit, lol.

No that's a redlib thing

libreddit instance allows you to do that. one I'm using right now: https://discuss.whatever.social/

note that you have to kinda bounce around from instance to instance as some will be great for a couple weeks then go away or crash and then you have to find another one.

No, you have to individually overwrite all your comments and then delete them to actually make them disappear. Even after all that workl some people have reported their comments returning.

Just checked my account and despite overwriting all my comments before deleting them...yeah, they're all back now.

no it doesnt, you have to use an extension or a script to delete it. only shadowbanning prevents another users from viewing, but reddit still has access to it.

I know it's great that Reddit is getting less useful but it's still infuriating that I can't find any help on very specific issues where the only answer was that one deleted comment/post.

You have downvotes because lemmy hates LLMs so much. It doesn't reflect reality or the general population. I'm not even critical of the hate, its the communities consensus.