Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn’t planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that’s a bit concerning. There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.

  • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    This is why I make sure that everything I post is offensive or inflammatory. That way, keeping my comments published is counterproductive for the platform, you dumb piece of shit.

    • ngwoo@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      See the reason Lemmy is better than Reddit is because you don’t have 37 people jumping down your throat right now because they didn’t understand the sarcasm

      • Zacpod@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        And you didn’t get a 3 day ban for threatening violence. Even if all you said was “I miss when we could unapologetically punch Nazis.”

        • ngwoo@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Reminds me of my Reddit “violence” ban. I said that RFK voters should have their brains looked inside for more brain worms. Admins took this to mean literally open their heads up, killing them in the process.

          Reddit will ban you for literally anything if it gets dogpiled hard enough with reports.

      • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        No, no, no… not you. You’re great! Your posts are great, your attitude is great, your hair looks good. I love everything about you. I was just making a comment about how sites like Reddit deserve to be littered with offensive and insulting comments you fucking moron.

  • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’ve replaced all of my Reddit comments for the past year with AI generated nonsense. It seems to have stuck. I plan on going through all of my past comments but will spread it out over time so that it’s harder to restore.

    IMO the key is making a post that writes gibberish but that is good enough to suck a user in to read it for a few seconds before they realize it is BS. That kills the user experience and poisons the site.

  • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    I’ve been saying this from the start:

    Any basic level competency backend team has change history on comments. Crack whatever jokes you like about Reddit but they at least have “basic level competency”

    It’s trivial for them to build some filters to detect mass changes and just fuckin roll them back.

    If you post ANYTHING on ANY server you don’t own: it’s out there. For ever.

    https://media1.tenor.com/m/OUzcn0WrxFEAAAAC/sandlot-forever.gif

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I always assumed keeping a change history for comments would be cost prohibitive. I mean there are millions of comments and God knows how many changes.

      But apparently it’s not a problem to keep versions of them. It doesn’t blow up the database?

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        2 months ago

        If you’re storing change deltas rather than whole copies of comments, the changes for all of Reddit should be far smaller than the comments for all of Reddit.

      • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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        2 months ago

        So they keep the change logs. Just don’t provide them for the users’ benefit.

        Sounds like what everyone else in all the spaces, does.

    • demizerone@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yep. I just deleted my top comments and deleted the account. I wasn’t a high fluting karma whore, but it was 15 years worth. I still open reddit accidentally often, and that site is for sure going for the generic social media route. Such a shame.

  • Sami@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    Are you sure it was previously deleted stuff? I thought the same thing had happened to me but it was due to subreddits being private at the time of deletion then later coming out of private (some weeks or months later) preventing those then privated posts/comments from being deleted. I think running another automated tool again should do the trick at this point.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      It seems to be undeleted. I confirmed that everything was gone at that time, and I am seeing no obvious pattern so far. I could be mistaken, but that’s how it appears.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      There might be something to this. I went and checked just now, prompted by a your comment, and I found a handful (like, six) comments from ages ago on reddit that did not get torched when I did my mass edit-and-delete, somehow. I found these mostly because some punters found them and necroposted on those threads, so I have notifications regarding them.

      I found a few more and deleted those by hand, too. Most of them were from the same sub, so that sub was probably locked when I did my mass delete.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Are you a resident of the EU? If so, I believe you have the legal right to demand that reddit delete all of your data and user content, and by law they must comply.

    If you are a US citizen, I believe you have very little recourse in forcing them to delete your data, unless you are a resident of California or Virginia.

    • mvirts@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I wonder what the legality of transferring ownership of the account to someone in the EU in order to request gdpr enforcement would be… Or I suppose you could become an EU resident but that would be rather difficult.

        • mbtrhcs@feddit.org
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          2 months ago

          Actually, the GDPR applies to EU citizens no matter where they are so you shouldn’t have to make your request from the EU for them to have to believe it

  • Ænima@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    On a plus side, maybe, if you choose to delete your comments and posts again, albeit slowly, would be to copy/paste the really useful shit to Lemmy. I say this because one unintended (or not) consequence of these actions is that posts from years ago, explaining the solution to a problem that still pops up now and then, doesn’t have the solution most of the time.

    I don’t disagree with the sentiment or actions at all, it just sucks when you find someone having the same issue you are, only to learn it’s on reddit and the solution to said problem was deleted.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      Yes, I’m considering this. Since I will have to go a few at a time it seems, I should be able to leave individual comments.

      • Ænima@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        That would be pretty boss of you. Thanks for being helpful on the past and considering leaving that help available to all!

        ::6 months later::

        Reddit announces users need to log in to view posts and comments

        Fffffffffff

  • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I had a similar issue. I had probably two million comment karma spread across about a dozen accounts. My first account was quickly auto-banned from several subreddits as soon as I started editing old comments. Those pro-spez mods had seen what people were doing during the exodus, and set the automod to ban those who tried.

    Then I did the same with my second, third, fourth, etc accounts. All of those were immediately site banned for ban evasion, because I was interacting with subs my first account had just been banned in. So none of the edits on those later accounts were pushed through.

    Reddit later un-banned those accounts, and all of my old comments were visible again. Likely to make the old comments show up.

  • illi@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    If you are from EU, you might try envoking the GDPR maybe? Though most make it incredibly difficult afaik

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    It’s one of the reasons I never deleted my account there every time my stuff pops back up I trounce it down again.

    Speaking of which, I just checked and YEAH, not everything I ever posted is back, not even all the highest rated stuff, but a lot has come back and deleting more than a few at a time starts throwing errors :)

  • public_image_ltd@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I just only did the first step: replace all I had written with random gibberish. And then I did nothing. Just left it there. And the gibberish is still there. Mission accomplished. One of the goals of this method was to feed KI with Nonsense. Obviously I wasn’t the only person who did so. And it looks like it has worked.

    • user134450@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      Actually using AI gibberish for this might be the best strategy of all, since Reddit seems hell bent on making money with AI training and feeding AI generated text into AI training has been shown to yield increasingly worse results over time. So you make the product Reddit is selling less attractive.

      • public_image_ltd@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Same thing like you did. The difference is I only edited the content and then I just left it. Deleting everything leads to reddit undeleting it. Leaving the Nonsense there did not trigger their alarm.

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’ve been doing the same thing, went back to read it now, and I have to admit I had a good time. Even though it took time to manually turn my comments into gibberish, it gave some hilarious results!

  • sarmale@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    This may be a little bit offtopic, but is there any way to archive my comments/posts in an offline file with links to the original thread if I want to see them again before I delethe them?

    • kamen@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I’m also interested in this. Haven’t gotten around to deleting my stuff. Some of the things I’ve posted over the years can be useful to me, so I wanna keep them.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      You used to be able to request all of your reddit data - I did that and I guess I have a file somewhere. I couldn’t tell you what’s in it - I’ve never been motivated to check.

      • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yeah, they (used to) send ya a csv with all your posts/comments. Got mine before I overwrote and deleted, 17 years worth. I trained an llm on it. It may or may not be writing this.

  • dan00@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    What happens if you create a fake community that only posts fake ai posts? Who is gonna ban you? It’s a genuine question

      • dan00@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        But you can fill up reddit with the most insane shit and they will train AI on it, both reddit and google.

        The fact that they are restoring valuable comments and posts means that they need them. But what if the most knowledgeable people on the platform go crazy? It is illegal to conspire against companies?

        • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I don’t think that could be done at a scale that matters, because it doesn’t make you any money.

          TBH the bigger threat is the corporate bots that already post in “human” subs. They’re destroying the site already, but Reddit doesn’t really care about that either, lol.

  • Korne127@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    If you live in the EU at least, I’m pretty sure much of this outright evil stuff Reddit is doing is illegal. If you want to delete your account and comments, they have to let you.