TL;DR: even if your delete script confirms a full wipe and your Reddit profile page shows zero comment, there may still be comments left over (that you can find through a search engine and delete manually on Reddit).

Weeks ago, I used redact.dev to delete all my Reddit comments (thousands of them over 10+ years). Redact.dev confirmed a full wipe, and my Profile > Comments page on Reddit confirmed I had no comment left.

Yet, as of today, Google still returns dozens of results for “$myredditusername site:reddit.com”. It’s not just Google’s crawler lagging; when I follow those links, those comments are still visible on the Reddit website, under my username, where I have the ability to manually delete them.

Thankfully, I hadn’t yet nuked my account, because I knew of other users whose deleted comments got reinstated (although that was thought to be caused by the deletion script exceeding the API rate limit; supposedly a different case, as those missed comments would still show in the Profile page).

spez: edited for clarity.

  • thingsiplay@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    @anon Reddit is known for bringing deleted comments back, without your consent. That’s especially bad for people who also delete the account, because they have no control anymore (I mean even less). Pretty scummy. More people should be aware of this issue.

    • Madison_rogue@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      It looks like that’s the case. I found a comment that was mine from 10 months ago. It looks as if Reddit recovered my deleted comments after I deleted my account.

      At this point, I don’t care. I left all that behind.

      • quirzle@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        Is it possible the sub was private when you deleted the comments? This and known, since-fixed issues with PowerDeleteSuite explain nearly all of the “undeleted” comments I’ve looked into in-depth.

          • quirzle@kbin.social
            1·
            1 year ago

            I’m not familiar with redact.dev and can’t comment on its accuracy, but your comments from earlier in this thread make it seem like you only found out about how the limitations of reddit’s profile page work about 11 hours ago. They probably weren’t deleted to begin with.

            • anon@kbin.socialOP
              1·
              1 year ago

              That’s right, they were most likely never deleted in the first place, despite Reddit’s indication to the contrary.

              • quirzle@kbin.social
                1·
                1 year ago

                Can you show this indication? Otherwise, this looks like a pretty clearcut case of user error.

                • anon@kbin.socialOP
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. Go to reddit.com, click on your profile page, then on Comments. This will show you a list of your comments. If that list is empty, and it wasn’t prior to you deleting all your comments with an API tool like redact.dev, you can reasonably conclude that all your comments are gone. Yet it’s not the case.

                  I can show you a screenshot of the blank Comments page, but I’m not sure what it would add.

                  • quirzle@kbin.social
                    1·
                    1 year ago

                    This comment (which you’ve replied to, so ostensibly have already seen) does a good job of articulating how this only shows the top thousand comments at a time and doesn’t update as you delete them.

                    Depending on which tool you deleted with, it may or may not have done a decent job of working around this reddit limitation to actually delete them all.

                    So it’s not necessarily pretty straightforward, especially if you commented a lot.