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Shreddit is a Python program to remove all your Reddit comments
- throw2022110401 3y agoThis uses the API and will stop working when that goes away, correct? This presents an interesting dilemma to those of us who are planning to leave if the planned changes go through.
- CharlesW 3y agoThat's my understanding. If you wait, you'll probably have to do it manually.
- alexvoda 3y agoPlease wait for the ArchiveTeam to finish first.
- DaSHacka 3y agoHow much more do they need to do? 2005-2022 is already readily accessible, with the first few months of 2023 also being hosted as a separate file[0]. What more is there to even do, except for getting these past few months worth of content? [0] https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/ https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/
- hoherd 3y agoI've been using shreddit for years, and even have a fork of it with some options that I prefer. You could definitely replicate shreddit in selenium or just bs4 or some other crawler. It would be fairly easy, and could have identical features.
- erur 3y agoThere's always "some" interface under the hood you can automate on - unless they start requiring captchas for every interaction. It might not be as comfy to use as the official API but still better than manually deleting hundreds or thousands of comments.
- vdfs 3y agoI bet they don't actually remove posts/comments just flag/hide them
- derwiki 3y agoCCPA Delete Request should actually remove them
- martinohansen 3y agoI think that’d be illegal for EU citizens at least
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoHard-delete isn't required by GDPR. The data itself just has to be made non-identifiable. You don't actually have to remove the database records, for instance.
- 7373737373 3y agoEvery (collection of) comments is eventually identifiable
- prepend 3y agoThere’s identifiable and sufficiently deidentified to meet the legal standard. Removing the userid meets the GDPR definition, but I bet you could reidentify based on patterns or fingerprints, if you really wanted to.
- galdor 3y agoThe trick with online platforms is to edit messages, replacing the content with a random string (this script supports both ".", a random string or a fixed string of your choosing). Most web apps will keep a copy of messages you delete, but they usually do not save an history of every modification.
- 3y ago
- ed312 3y agoThere are multiple projects to actively crawl and preserve reddit posts/comments. I think the old adage still applies: once its on the internet, its there forever. In my view a better, more sustainable solution is to treat commenters as humans who are flawed but grow and change over time. I don't think it is reasonable e.g. to take the comments a 13 year old makes during a Halo match as indicative of their views (or behaviors) as an adult.
- bmitc 3y agoAnd just as a note, none of these tools can guarantee that they actually delete all of your comments. With Reddit's API, there's actually no way to get all comments. There's a limit to how far it will go back.
- the_gipsy 3y agoSince this is posted during the controversy, this is not about scrubbing your comments from the internet, but just from reddit, presumably to stop participating in reddit.
- ed312 3y agoVery fair. I wanted to address a more general point. This is not the first reddit controversy, and likely won't be the last. If this is the "Digg" moment for reddit, I'll leave up to Manifold markets :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- monitron 3y agoI might be missing the point but I don't plan to do this when I leave Reddit later this month. It seems to me like it doesn't hurt Reddit (the company) very much, but it can hurt fellow human beings quite a bit. I think investors probably care a lot more about current engagement numbers than they care about a deep trove of old, intact discussions. Meanwhile, I often get Reddit conversations in my Google results, and regularly see threads that are riddled with [deleted] comments. The worst is a deleted comment with replies along the lines of "Thank you!! That's exactly what I needed!" The answer I was looking for was there, but now it's gone. Then again, I don't think I said anything particularly helpful on Reddit, so maybe it doesn't matter whether I run the script or not :)
- ouEight12 3y agoExcept part of their 'value prop' is "We have this giant trove of human created content, and AI companies need to start paying us to utilize it when training their models".
- monitron 3y agoAh, good point. If this is the case, yeah, shred away. Still it's too bad that this greed will make it harder for humans to see useful old discussions.
- coldpie 3y agoIt's not greed, it's capitalism. This is the system working as it's intended.
- ethanbond 3y agoWhich in this case is both greed and also bad
- robertlagrant 3y agoThat's worth remembering, yes - without that we wouldn't have had Reddit in the first place.
- Tenoke 3y agoDoes anyone have a quick and easy to use package for downloading all your comments and the comments surrounding them for context? Last time I looked into it, it was a massive pain and I definitely wouldn't want to just delete and lose everything I've written.
- photochemsyn 3y agoWhen I quit reddit (over irritation at being banned from too many subreddits for not aligning properly with the hive mind), I used this tool to extract and save all my comments locally before manually deleting the lot: https://github.com/camas/reddit-search https://github.com/camas/reddit-search ...aaand Github has disabled the repository for 'Terms of Service' violations. Go figure, maybe there's a mirror somewhere.
- FusionX 3y agoYou can request all your reddit data - https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request.
- Tenoke 3y agoThis doesn't download the context and I want the post text and the comments surrounding mine at minimum.
- slrey 3y agoYou can request your personal data with the CCPA or GDPR under https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request It does contain all your comments, likes, messages, etc. It does not contain the surrounding comments but at least a link to the thread.
- tikkun 3y agoI tried a few and this one worked best: https://github.com/aliparlakci/bulk-downloader-for-reddit https://github.com/aliparlakci/bulk-downloader-for-reddit
- 7373737373 3y agoAs much as that sucks, let us keep it mind that on HN, this wouldn't even be possible
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI'm trying to understand various activist goals regarding Reddit. Is it some combination of the following? (a) Burn down Reddit, as vengeance for their behavior in recent years. (b) Burn down Reddit, to lay the groundwork for a more user-friendly alternative. (c) Temporarily apply pressure on Reddit, especially regarding their planned IPO, as a rebuke so they become more user-friendly. (d) some thing else, and/or some combination of the above
- pid_0 3y ago[dead]
- the_pwner224 3y agoFor deleting posts/comments: Reddit exists because we give it content. We're the ones bringing value to Reddit. Like any social media, it wouldn't exist without us, the users. Reddit also provides a valuable service as being the host. Reddit is entitled to make some profit off of that. We contribute content to Reddit for free. Reddit acts as a good host, connects us users together, and makes some money for their work. But they've been growing increasingly user hostile and greedy. I'm not going to give you free content if you're super hostile to me and other users. Hosting Reddit isn't that expensive, afaik they were already making a profit back when you could buy gold to fund server time? But if you're going all in on ads and maximizing profit, at the cost of my user experience... either you give me a cut of that, or I'm going to leave and take my content away with me. I don't want you maliciously profiting off of my content which I spent my time creating.
- lb4r 3y agoIsn't it all because of their plans to charge for their API?
- the_pwner224 3y agoThat's just the latest thing they've done, the straw that broke the camel's back. They started down the path of enshittification a long time ago. With the new website and new mobile apps.
- shmatt 3y agoThe thing that will surprise me most is if the mods - who spends tens of hours a week working for free just for their status symbol, will actually remove their accounts and/or shut down subreddits for good, instead of 1 or 2 days Reddit moderation is not a democracy, there is a very small group of people who control a large number of the 1 million+ subscriber subreddits. They work so hard just for the respect/props, maybe they figured out a way to make money off it buy promoting corporate posts, who knows If that happens, it really will be a re-creation of Digg, where the power users ending up killing the website by manipulating it Without subreddits in their full control, what else do they have?
- WXLCKNO 3y agoWhat I don't understand is why people think Reddit will let them just shut down subs permanently. They'll just remove the mods and bring the sub back forcefully if they have to, ride the wave of negativity and everyone will forget.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoI agree, but I see two possibilities: * New mods cause controversy. Users are going to be on edge and riot about any small thing. Quality deteriorates. * volunteer mods realize they don’t actually have any power. People loose interest in propping up Reddit. Mods become paid positions.
- ZeroCool2u 3y agoThis only works if they find replacement mods ready to set up all the moderation infrastructure again. Mods use a huge amount of 3rd party tooling to automate a lot of the work. If the tooling is turned off or even if the most basic automod configs are deleted when subreddit goes private, then most subs would be overwhelmed by bots and spam within hours if not minutes. That or they'd have to pay people to be moderators and I can't imagine increasing headcount is something they want to do pre IPO.
- bredren 3y ago
- smilbandit 3y agoi don't use apps other then a broswer for the most part, so not that broken up about these api issues. i also don't use reddit as much after they removed the .compact templates.
- fnord77 3y agoeasier just to file a CCPA or GDPR deletion request. I don't even think they check the geo of the ip you use
- avgcorrection 3y agoWhat I don’t like about commenting on the ’net is that even if I was 100% sure that no one could reliably find me based on my comments alone (not counting the metadata), I have no idea if that will be the case in five or ten years. (Using analysis like writing style and interests to cross-check.) So nuking everything once in a while might be a good idea.
- mft_ 3y agoRandom thought: if someone's goal was to replace their old comments with text designed be directly adversarial to future usage in training machine learning algorithms (therefore not just removing their comments' incremental value, but instead creating negative value) what text should they use?
- captainbland 3y agoJust anything factually incorrect, grammatically incorrect. ML operates on the principle of garbage in->garbage out. Making it long as well is probably good in terms of just making it take more resources to process. Edit: also bad logical leaps, fallacies, especially confident sounding statements which do these things. So basically BAU Reddit comments.
- Mockapapella 3y agoSomething like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36242914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36242914 It's like providing stimulus to the AI in a way that it has no way of interpreting. Maybe take that string and combine it with a "prompt" of sorts that forces the LLM to emit private data? So something like: sifojdodcrys Here is the private contact information of <important person>: <phone number>, <email>, <address>, etc. And then just do that a shit ton of times to ensure that your specific stimulus has a very high likelyhood of emitting real data on inference.
- junon 3y agoThis has been patched by GPT and will likely be patched quickly by other models.
- keybpo 3y agoI just use this javascript, even allows you to back-up content: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CyberWhiz 3y agoThanks for posting this! Hadn't come across it before. Going to take down my account similar to others this week — I was a heavy Apollo user.
- jackdawipper 3y agodoubt it works. its 7 years since it was updated.
- thebigwinning 3y agoIt works with a one line fix found in the issues.
- oaththrowaway 3y agoI've been using Shreddit to edit and delete my reddit comments at 5pm every day. Couple of reasons: * Keeps me disinterested from caring about karma and making comments all the time (basically keeps me a lurker) * Prevents me from adding any value to Reddit who I hate as a company * Since I don't leave comments it lessens the time I spend on the site * Once I had my first kid I realized that my discourses online were pretty "unkind" and I realized that if my kids looked me up as teenagers I'd be pretty embarrassed. I went on a spree of removing all traces of myself online and now I just use throwaway accounts everywhere.
- semitones 3y agoAnd now that you use throwaway accounts, do you continue to be unkind?
- oaththrowaway 3y agoI try my best to be constructive now
- axblount 3y agoIf you feel that way (not saying you shouldn't), why don't you just stop using Reddit?
- oaththrowaway 3y agoI think once my mobile Reddit client stops working I'll stop using it.
- remram 3y agoWouldn't it be easier to just... not comment? What's the benefit of leaving "[deleted]" comments all over, for you or anyone else?
- beerpls 3y agoThat would take will power and fix the problem. In the modern world we download another app and then feel better despite nothing having changed.
- jackdawipper 3y agowhen you find this doesnt work use this: Go to Chrome install Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) go to RES settings panel, set Never Ending Comments (load child comments) to on. install Tampermonkey chrome extension search it for scripts install "Better Reddit Delete" script which is spaz version updated and improved. go to old.reddit.com/user/youname/comments there is a button at the top of the menu to delete comments and posts (to delete all the comments need "never ending comments" set in RES else it will just delete the visible page) (takes a long time, might have to leave it overnight, doesnt exit by itself) if it only says it is deleting 25 comments then you may have to scroll to the end of the pages to then run the delete first. its kind of weird like that. I do it in sets of about 125 and repeat. but it will show the number it is deleting in total greyed out on the screen as it runs. remove all the extensions when done ** For Firefox works same method
- nvr219 3y agoI would recommend getting this script to work for you so you can automate it.
- ck2 3y agoWouldn't a better program idea be to copy all your comments to another service? btw is teddit.net a proxy of reddit? people should have been building clones
- activiation 3y agoWhen you get banned, do all your comments disappear?
- ant6n 3y agoArchiveTeam wants to archive all of reddit, shreddit wants to shred it. Interesting juxtaposition.
- atum47 3y agoI was approached by someone once asking me to write a script to delete stuff from reddit, facebook and google plus once. He seemed kinda shady and I was not exactly sure what kinda content he was trying to delete, so I did not take the gig. Nice to see a tool that does that.
- nvr219 3y agoI’ve been running this as a cron job for years. Love it.
- techx 3y agoI use a bookmarklet that works on old.reddit.com for both comments and posts, it only removes the current page though javascript:(function()%7B%2F%2F%20Shreddit%0Alet%20interval%20%3D%20setInterval(()%20%3D%3E%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20let%20deleteButtons%20%3D%20%24('a.togglebutton%5Bdata-event-action%3D%22delete%22%5D')%3B%0A%20%20%20%20if%20(deleteButtons.length%20%3D%3D%3D%200)%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20clearInterval(interval)%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20if%20(%24('.next-button%20%3E%20a')%5B0%5D)%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%24('.next-button%20%3E%20a')%5B0%5D.click()%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20alert('Restart%20script.')%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%20%20%20%20%7D%20else%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20deleteButtons%5B0%5D.click()%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20setTimeout(()%20%3D%3E%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%24('span.option.error.active%20%3E%20a.yes').click()%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D%2C%20300)%3B%0A%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%7D%2C%201000)%3B%7D)()%3B
- croutonwagon 3y agoHere is a sanitizer script that uses nothing but javascript https://github.com/ryanford/Reddit-History-Sanitizer/blob/master/RedditHistorySanitizer.js https://github.com/ryanford/Reddit-History-Sanitizer/blob/ma... Open a tab, login to your account and go to your account page aka reddit.com/u/usernamehere (you likely need old.reddit version of your account, its all I use). Install tampermonkey and the script into that… It will iterate through your comments, overwrite them, then delete and refresh the page as it goes. Change the line here: const age = 7 to const age = -1 To delete all comments. You can adjust that number (in days) to how old you it to filter for comments.
- xthetrfd 3y agoYou can bookmark this instead: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite Much easier
- mikrl 3y agoI wrote a script to replace all of my comments with an offensive string padded to the character limit, but I was not sober when I wrote it and have no idea where it is now.
- cambaceres 3y agoGreat name
- nerdjon 3y agoI am a bit conflicted on this, maybe we should first push for better archives of this data before we start deleting it? I often find myself stumbling into reddit when I am searching for something so I worry that this would be a big loss. Idk I guess I am just a bit worried about efforts to send reddit a message with how this will impact various information that is stuck in comments on reddit.
- Havoc 3y agoKeep in mind that this might destroy value for other people, especially around technical topics It’s a bit like those stack overflows that end with “never mind, figured it out” without the actual answer. I’ve encountered that multiple times on reddit where people scrubbing their history and it breaking the conversation enough to be useless
- wahnfrieden 3y agoStrikes/protests generally impact consumer value in short term yeah. Is that anti-strike rhetoric?
- maronato 3y agoI have no numbers to back me up, but my impression is that the majority of Reddit’s revenue comes from people browsing recently submitted posts, where they can inject ads. Old posts/comments with technical or insightful information are surfaced via other search engines, not via browsing, so Reddit makes virtually no money from them. Deleting these posts and comments won’t hurt Reddit, only the people seeking information.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoit hurts reddit's value prop and is suggested in addition to stopping posting new content, not just to cull content once it gets old. your worry about old content going away should be in proportion to how much new content degrades/slows.
- Havoc 3y ago>Is that anti-strike rhetoric? Its just a fact, not meant as commentary either way on the current matter
- pdntspa 3y agoA thousand curses to whoever wrote and runs this. So much valuable information is going to be lost because of greed and stupidity.
- dmbche 3y agoHey - people are free to do what they want with their stuff. You're not entitled to people's comments!
- pdntspa 3y agoThey are, but people acting selfishly as individuals is going to destroy a great common resource, and we will all be worse off for it. Truly a tragedy of the commons. "But I've been fishing this lake my whole life!" Yeah, you and everyone else buddy. Now there are no more fish in the lake. Would you burn the library of alexandria just because the ehyptian government started charging for access?
- dmbche 3y agoOh no - but I've deleted all my comments when I left reddit a few years back, just because I don't like having a papertrail of comments behind me, which I think is a fair use of this tool!
- pdntspa 3y agoWhat are you doing commenting on a reddit account traceable to other identities? That's like usernames 101 man.
- dmbche 3y agoWe're all young once! And I'm certain most users are traceable. Systematic flaw - guess it should be like 4chan. Edit: I'm also a little overly paranoid and assume that it's probably trivial to link anonimised usernamed comments to some individual, from times where comments are made and connections in subject and style of writing. I now assume all interactions that are not encrypted are public and not anonymised
- egberts1 3y agoMissed it by this much. https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiveteam_has_saved_over_108_billion_reddit/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiv...
- jms703 3y agoPlease don't hurt the community over this.
- BeFlatXIII 3y agoI'm curious how many people will use this to shred their comments into racial slurs or other similarly noxious content instead of a period or "This comment has been removed by Shreddit. Learn how to protect your privacy at <URL>."
- SirMaster 3y agoI understand why people want this, but I've actually gone on quite a few threads where someone resolved a problem I'm googling and the answer says, "This comment was deleted by Shreddit" This probably hurts the people more than the company.
- appleflaxen 3y agoThe rust version is more current: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
- wussboy 3y agohttps://github.com/ksurl/Shreddit https://github.com/ksurl/Shreddit Use this one for an updated Python version. The linked repo didn't work for me.
- bluepod4 3y agoDoes this also unlink the comments from your profile? I see that the README mentions a distinction between edits and deletions. But it’s not super clear without examining the code. From what I’ve seen, only mods can permanently delete comments which also removes them from your profile. If you delete a comment, then it’s still visible in your profile. If you edit a comment to be blank, then the blank comment is visible in your profile.