9 ms·

There's a python script[1] (long abandoned) called shreddit that allows you to delete old comments. It first wipes out the comment (edits them and saves a blank

There's a python script[1] (long abandoned) called shreddit that allows you to delete old comments. It first wipes out the comment (edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you choose), then deletes it. Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments. Someone rewrote shreddit in Rust[2] I'm currently rewriting it in JS for Deno. Still in early stages so not worth posting the mess that it's in now. As soon as I'm finished with mine I'm going to setup a cron job and have it delete any reply older than a year (with some exceptions you can set either by subreddit or by comment ids). I don't have any comments about pirating so I'm not worried about that, but I also don't think comments on social media need to last forever, especially with all of the data-mining being done on them (remember Cambridge Analytica). I think something similar exists for Twitter and Facebook but I don't remember their names at the moment, maybe someone here does. 1. https://github.com/x89/Shreddit https://github.com/x89/Shreddit 2. https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit

ricardobayes 3y ago
What a sad world we live in that we need to self-censor opinions on the Internet. I long for the "good old days" which were in fact not that long ago.
- sli 3y ago
  Freedom was long bought and paid for, this is just a natural consequence of not reigning in corporate power.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Feels like a wash compared to the 2000s, 2010s, or whatever. First off, I'd only be worried about my school or employer finding "bad" things, not the govt. Maybe more things are politically incorrect now, but some things are more acceptable than before, and web security is much tighter than it used to be.
- randomdata 3y ago
  For what reason? Once you can establish a firm opinion no additional value can be gained by continuing to talk about it, so any opinions you give are obviously hypothetical. Hell, they are bound to be contradictory from one comment to the next as you can't learn from only hypothetically opinionating one perspective. What can be taken from that? Even if someone wanted to use your opinions against you, there is no way for them to figure out what your opinions are because, again, there is no value in talking about your actual opinions. They are already established. There is nothing more you are willing to learn from them, so there is no remaining communication value.
  - cellularmitosis 3y ago
    what?
    - randomdata 3y ago
      In order to allocate your precious time writing a comment over doing one of the many other things life offers there has to be a return on investment. Otherwise, why bother? When it comes to opinions, the return on investment in sharing them is being able to receive the responses around the opinion shared in which to learn from. Once you have accepted an opinion as your own, however, you have had to believe that you understand it to the greatest extent possible and spending more time learning about it is going to be unfruitful. As such, there is no remaining value in talking about the opinions you actually hold. Only the opinions you don't hold are those you are going to share, as those are the ones that are still out there able to be learned from. They are merely hypothetical, and are likely to be contradictory as you explore different angles. Indeed, you may come to hold those once-hypothetical opinions in time as you learn more about it. As that happens, the value in sharing them will diminish. There is good reason why we don't spend our days sharing that we believe "1+1=2" and "the sky is blue". One's own opinion has no communication value. So, what is to be gained by censoring a hypothetical opinion that may not be held by anyone and certainly not you? If it were your opinion you wouldn't have to worry about censoring it because there would be no value in sharing it in the first place.
      - 3y ago
- 93po 3y ago
  You can still go hang out on Freenet or Tor and they're both pretty private if you're not dumb about it.
bloopernova 3y ago
reveddit and unddit (and many more) archive copies of comments very frequently. To not have your comment archived/copied, you'd need to delete it within just a couple of minutes of submitting it. Reddit itself has no real way to prevent this from happening. I don't know if there is a way to have a forum-like reddit clone that would allow comments to be truly deleted and forgotten. Heck, I'd like it if there was infrastructure available for sites to verify GnuPG-signed comments.
- sli 3y ago
  Uneddit and Reveddit, at least, do not archive comments deleted by the user that posted them. They archive comments deleted by moderators and admins.
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    Ah, I didn't know that. Thank you for the new information!
  - 0l 3y ago
    This is not true: these sites rely on Pushshift, which archives ALL comments (at the time of their creation), and Pushshifts data is then compared with Reddits data, allowing it to work out which comments have been deleted.
    - someNameIG 3y ago
      You can request your account not to be (publicly) archived on Pushshift.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  At least deleting from the main site reduces the chance of someone stumbling upon something "bad" that causes them to target you.
- brokenmachine 3y ago
  Reveddit used to work pretty well, but for about the last couple of months every time I've tried to use it, it doesn't seem to show any deleted comments. I think reddit has nerfed pushshift.
Scoundreller 3y ago
Instead of deleting the comments, could you just replace it with some gibberish that includes “RCN” and other ISP names and some piracy adjacent terms? One thing we all know about Reddit is that their search is garbage.
- sli 3y ago
  Any good account scrubber for reddit will edit your comment to some pre-defined text before deleting it, shreddit is no different.
7speter 3y ago
>Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments. Reddit (devs) are saying they don't do this, but are other companies doing this? Reddit kinda confirmed that this is at least possible by announcing they want money from parties that are using their API at scale.
SpaceManNabs 3y ago
I do this frequently. One thing to watch out for is that some communities will be very annoyed that your profile is periodically deleted. For example, cryptocurrency redditors love to opine based on what other subs you are active in.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Was wondering about this. You keep the karma at least, but yeah, Reddit can be exclusive. I only care about my account the rare times I need to ask a question without being auto-banned or algo-downranked.
ziml77 3y ago
I hate when people do this kind of purge on Reddit instead of just deleting the account and letting the comments stay. So much useful information has been destroyed thanks to these tools. I'm glad that dang does not allow this to happen on HN.
- Klonoar 3y ago
  We literally had a project on the HN front page a few months ago that could identify users from commenting styles. Removal of the comment itself matters, nobody owes you information forever.
  - jareklupinski 3y ago
    that would be neat though imagine going to your account section and seeing the 'worth' of your comments if you want to delete your account, you would be offered that amount for the site to be able to keep your output
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      There are already businesses that will buy an established reddit account from you. These arrangements exist for anything with accounts with rep, whether they be reddit accounts or instagram or runescape accounts.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    It sets a dangerous precent because these tools make it seem like you can remove stuff from the internet for good, when you cannot. They don’t do anything for services that crawl reddit and archive all your posts.
    - zzzeek 3y ago
      so, then "So much useful information has been destroyed" claimed by grandparent post is not actually correct then?
lebski88 3y ago
I used the rust one a few weeks ago to shred my almost 17 year comment history. I was quite sad to do so but someone started harassing me for stopping them from scamming on the sub I moderate and I realized that it was just a liability. On another note the Reddit admins wouldn't ban them despite them literally and repeatedly scamming money from users by pretending to need food. Despite them also posting at the same time about the weed they just bought. And also harrasing me and others across the site. One of the admins kept pushing it for me but apparently the team in charge thought it was a difficult case and only sent them a warning. The whole thing was just disgusting.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
These remind me of those status updates copywriting your facebook messages. If you put it on there, its out there whether you delete it or not, archived on a dozen plus crawlers.
- neuronic 3y ago
  Until those go down or are abandoned...
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Those were hilarious. "I agreed to Facebook's ToS, but I own the content, <insert copy-pasted legalese that I don't understand>."
system16 3y ago
> edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you choose), then deletes it My account is 15 years old and I've been manually doing this for some time now. A few years ago, I had a comment get upvoted to the top of a popular thread in a major sub, but it had some mildly identifiable information about myself, so I deleted it. A few months later, Reddit had this personal "year in review" page you could click through, shamelessly similar to Spotify's year in review (I have't seen it in recent years so I think they stopped doing it). For "most popular comment" surprise, surprise, it was the comment I deleted, there in full text. After this I started using the method described above: editing every comment I make, saving a blank string, and then deleting. I usually do this once a week. It's tedious, but at least I can reasonably assume my comments are actually deleted.
- dylan604 3y ago
  If you're going to this much trouble, why are you even bothering to participate on that site at all?
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I think there is a huge difference between participating in an ephemeral conversation about some topic and having your comments permanently and irrevocably archived and searchable. I would much prefer comments here to automatically delete after some reasonable time period (a week?), or provide an API I can use to go in and scrub every so often. But HN decided that it doesn't work that way so I live with it. I don't really see how the site benefits from keeping comments alive forever. Do a significant number of people really go back and read comments on articles from 10 years ago?
    - dylan604 3y ago
      In the year 2023, I'm kind of flabbergasted that anyone would believe that something that takes place on the internet is considered ephemeral. >I would much prefer comments here to automatically delete after some reasonable time period (a week?) you're more than welcome to build that and release it to see how much traction it would get. but it's also weird to think that the responses to questions that are valid to post now would not still be relevant in the future for people to come back to (or find for the first time via search). if your response is truly not worthy for future reading, i would have to ask if it is really worth now. if you're that concerned about having that response associated to you, then i'd again say maybe it is best not being made at all.
93po 3y ago
> Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments. As far as I know, this was said a very long time ago and is assuredly not true anymore.

ricardobayes 3y ago

What a sad world we live in that we need to self-censor opinions on the Internet. I long for the "good old days" which were in fact not that long ago.

sli 3y ago
Freedom was long bought and paid for, this is just a natural consequence of not reigning in corporate power.
hot_gril 3y ago
Feels like a wash compared to the 2000s, 2010s, or whatever. First off, I'd only be worried about my school or employer finding "bad" things, not the govt. Maybe more things are politically incorrect now, but some things are more acceptable than before, and web security is much tighter than it used to be.
randomdata 3y ago
For what reason? Once you can establish a firm opinion no additional value can be gained by continuing to talk about it, so any opinions you give are obviously hypothetical. Hell, they are bound to be contradictory from one comment to the next as you can't learn from only hypothetically opinionating one perspective. What can be taken from that? Even if someone wanted to use your opinions against you, there is no way for them to figure out what your opinions are because, again, there is no value in talking about your actual opinions. They are already established. There is nothing more you are willing to learn from them, so there is no remaining communication value.
- cellularmitosis 3y ago
  what?
  - randomdata 3y ago
    In order to allocate your precious time writing a comment over doing one of the many other things life offers there has to be a return on investment. Otherwise, why bother? When it comes to opinions, the return on investment in sharing them is being able to receive the responses around the opinion shared in which to learn from. Once you have accepted an opinion as your own, however, you have had to believe that you understand it to the greatest extent possible and spending more time learning about it is going to be unfruitful. As such, there is no remaining value in talking about the opinions you actually hold. Only the opinions you don't hold are those you are going to share, as those are the ones that are still out there able to be learned from. They are merely hypothetical, and are likely to be contradictory as you explore different angles. Indeed, you may come to hold those once-hypothetical opinions in time as you learn more about it. As that happens, the value in sharing them will diminish. There is good reason why we don't spend our days sharing that we believe "1+1=2" and "the sky is blue". One's own opinion has no communication value. So, what is to be gained by censoring a hypothetical opinion that may not be held by anyone and certainly not you? If it were your opinion you wouldn't have to worry about censoring it because there would be no value in sharing it in the first place.
    - 3y ago
93po 3y ago
You can still go hang out on Freenet or Tor and they're both pretty private if you're not dumb about it.

bloopernova 3y ago

reveddit and unddit (and many more) archive copies of comments very frequently. To not have your comment archived/copied, you'd need to delete it within just a couple of minutes of submitting it. Reddit itself has no real way to prevent this from happening. I don't know if there is a way to have a forum-like reddit clone that would allow comments to be truly deleted and forgotten. Heck, I'd like it if there was infrastructure available for sites to verify GnuPG-signed comments.

sli 3y ago
Uneddit and Reveddit, at least, do not archive comments deleted by the user that posted them. They archive comments deleted by moderators and admins.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Ah, I didn't know that. Thank you for the new information!
- 0l 3y ago
  This is not true: these sites rely on Pushshift, which archives ALL comments (at the time of their creation), and Pushshifts data is then compared with Reddits data, allowing it to work out which comments have been deleted.
  - someNameIG 3y ago
    You can request your account not to be (publicly) archived on Pushshift.
hot_gril 3y ago
At least deleting from the main site reduces the chance of someone stumbling upon something "bad" that causes them to target you.
brokenmachine 3y ago
Reveddit used to work pretty well, but for about the last couple of months every time I've tried to use it, it doesn't seem to show any deleted comments. I think reddit has nerfed pushshift.

Scoundreller 3y ago

Instead of deleting the comments, could you just replace it with some gibberish that includes “RCN” and other ISP names and some piracy adjacent terms? One thing we all know about Reddit is that their search is garbage.

sli 3y ago
Any good account scrubber for reddit will edit your comment to some pre-defined text before deleting it, shreddit is no different.

7speter 3y ago

>Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments. Reddit (devs) are saying they don't do this, but are other companies doing this? Reddit kinda confirmed that this is at least possible by announcing they want money from parties that are using their API at scale.

SpaceManNabs 3y ago

I do this frequently. One thing to watch out for is that some communities will be very annoyed that your profile is periodically deleted. For example, cryptocurrency redditors love to opine based on what other subs you are active in.

hot_gril 3y ago
Was wondering about this. You keep the karma at least, but yeah, Reddit can be exclusive. I only care about my account the rare times I need to ask a question without being auto-banned or algo-downranked.

ziml77 3y ago

I hate when people do this kind of purge on Reddit instead of just deleting the account and letting the comments stay. So much useful information has been destroyed thanks to these tools. I'm glad that dang does not allow this to happen on HN.

Klonoar 3y ago
We literally had a project on the HN front page a few months ago that could identify users from commenting styles. Removal of the comment itself matters, nobody owes you information forever.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  that would be neat though imagine going to your account section and seeing the 'worth' of your comments if you want to delete your account, you would be offered that amount for the site to be able to keep your output
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    There are already businesses that will buy an established reddit account from you. These arrangements exist for anything with accounts with rep, whether they be reddit accounts or instagram or runescape accounts.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  It sets a dangerous precent because these tools make it seem like you can remove stuff from the internet for good, when you cannot. They don’t do anything for services that crawl reddit and archive all your posts.
  - zzzeek 3y ago
    so, then "So much useful information has been destroyed" claimed by grandparent post is not actually correct then?

lebski88 3y ago

I used the rust one a few weeks ago to shred my almost 17 year comment history. I was quite sad to do so but someone started harassing me for stopping them from scamming on the sub I moderate and I realized that it was just a liability. On another note the Reddit admins wouldn't ban them despite them literally and repeatedly scamming money from users by pretending to need food. Despite them also posting at the same time about the weed they just bought. And also harrasing me and others across the site. One of the admins kept pushing it for me but apparently the team in charge thought it was a difficult case and only sent them a warning. The whole thing was just disgusting.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

These remind me of those status updates copywriting your facebook messages. If you put it on there, its out there whether you delete it or not, archived on a dozen plus crawlers.

neuronic 3y ago
Until those go down or are abandoned...
hot_gril 3y ago
Those were hilarious. "I agreed to Facebook's ToS, but I own the content, <insert copy-pasted legalese that I don't understand>."

system16 3y ago

> edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you choose), then deletes it My account is 15 years old and I've been manually doing this for some time now. A few years ago, I had a comment get upvoted to the top of a popular thread in a major sub, but it had some mildly identifiable information about myself, so I deleted it. A few months later, Reddit had this personal "year in review" page you could click through, shamelessly similar to Spotify's year in review (I have't seen it in recent years so I think they stopped doing it). For "most popular comment" surprise, surprise, it was the comment I deleted, there in full text. After this I started using the method described above: editing every comment I make, saving a blank string, and then deleting. I usually do this once a week. It's tedious, but at least I can reasonably assume my comments are actually deleted.

dylan604 3y ago
If you're going to this much trouble, why are you even bothering to participate on that site at all?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I think there is a huge difference between participating in an ephemeral conversation about some topic and having your comments permanently and irrevocably archived and searchable. I would much prefer comments here to automatically delete after some reasonable time period (a week?), or provide an API I can use to go in and scrub every so often. But HN decided that it doesn't work that way so I live with it. I don't really see how the site benefits from keeping comments alive forever. Do a significant number of people really go back and read comments on articles from 10 years ago?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    In the year 2023, I'm kind of flabbergasted that anyone would believe that something that takes place on the internet is considered ephemeral. >I would much prefer comments here to automatically delete after some reasonable time period (a week?) you're more than welcome to build that and release it to see how much traction it would get. but it's also weird to think that the responses to questions that are valid to post now would not still be relevant in the future for people to come back to (or find for the first time via search). if your response is truly not worthy for future reading, i would have to ask if it is really worth now. if you're that concerned about having that response associated to you, then i'd again say maybe it is best not being made at all.

93po 3y ago

> Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments. As far as I know, this was said a very long time ago and is assuredly not true anymore.