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 well before the API shutdown 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 they should show in the Profile page).

So even if your Reddit profile says you have no more comments, use a search engine and you may find plenty of leftovers.

spez: edited for clarity.

  • anon@kbin.socialOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    Because you’re both claiming to understand the failing of reddit’s UI and claiming the same UI as a reliable indicator of all comments getting deleted. Rather, it seems some comments were likely missed because of the shitty UI. Relying on reddit’s UI for this is the specific user error to which I was referring. I hope that’s clearer.

    Thanks for clarifying. I understand the failing of Reddit’s UI from reading about it in the replies here. I didn’t know about it when I first posted, so there is no contradiction there. I also had no reason then to believe that either the redact tool (which reported deleting all comments) nor the Reddit UX (which reported no comment left) were inaccurate in their reporting.

    Had either displayed wording similar to that service page you linked to, I would agree with you that it would have been user error to ignore it.

    Barring that, I think it’s a stretch to claim user error when an obscure technical limitation of Reddit makes its UX misleading in a non-obvious way.