Yeah… I did this too when leaving. Made a small app to edit and delete every comment I made. I actually had a useful IT related self hosting post which was also nuked. I guess that’s the price the whole community had to pay for reddits thirst for profit.
Although, long ago, I heard of a rumor; all of reddit was frequently backed up and available for download. Is that still a thing? Was it ever a thing?
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.
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)
Someone in this thread posted a similar thing that’s probably better. When I left, there wasn’t anything like it so I had to cobble something together.
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.
Yeah… I did this too when leaving. Made a small app to edit and delete every comment I made. I actually had a useful IT related self hosting post which was also nuked. I guess that’s the price the whole community had to pay for reddits thirst for profit.
Although, long ago, I heard of a rumor; all of reddit was frequently backed up and available for download. Is that still a thing? Was it ever a thing?
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.
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)
Someone in this thread posted a similar thing that’s probably better. When I left, there wasn’t anything like it so I had to cobble something together.
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.