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I've done a lot of research on deleting reddit data recently and there are some important things the reddit community should know about reddit data and actually
by nabakin 6y ago
I've done a lot of research on deleting reddit data recently and there are some important things the reddit community should know about reddit data and actually deleting it.
The most important thing is that 99% of reddit deletion tools out there (in fact all I have found except for two) do not actually delete your reddit data.
Most of these tools rely on the last 1000 posts and comments listed on your profile but do not delete any other comments or posts you have made and even then, most of these do not edit your comments and posts before deleting which means those 1000 posts and comments are still stored on reddit's servers.
To completely remove your reddit data, I have found only one way and that is with reddit-shreddit [0]. Despite its name being extraordinarily similar to another popular reddit deletion tool called Shreddit [1] which doesn't actually work, it is entirely different. reddit-shreddit works by taking the data from a reddit GDPR data request which includes links to all your posts and comments and editing and deleting each and every one. With this method, reddit-shreddit does not need to scrape posts and comments from reddit to know what to delete. It can leverage the official GDPR-compliant data request from reddit ensuring all of your posts and comments are known and are deleted. If you wish to confirm they are actually deleted, you can submit another data request to verify all of your posts and comments are gone from reddit's servers. It may also be possible to remove your data from reddit with a GDPR request but I'm not sure. I haven't looked into that.
Although you can remove your data from reddit's servers, that does not mean it is gone. Ever since reddit was created, people have been scraping and archiving it. The most popular reddit archiving service is called pushshift and it has archives for every year of reddit up to 2015 when it started archiving every month. Pushshift runs the API that powers this website and other popular reddit tools like removeddit and the former ceddit. Luckily the developer has been known to delete your data if you request it. I've seen it mentioned on reddit that you can email him or pm him on reddit and he will remove your data. Unfortunately all the archives from previous years are still floating around the internet outside of pushshift but at least your data will disappear from the largest source.
[0] https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit
[1] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit https://github.com/x89/Shreddit