How do delete my reddit account with history

October 18, 2023 12:22 PM

I'm late to the game, but I'm finally thoroughly sick of reddit and I want to delete my account. More importantly, I would like to delete all my comments, preferably by overwriting them with "lorem ipsum" or whatever. This is an old account -- back from when Metafilter introduced me to this albatross, and I help moderate a number of subs. So doing as thorough a job of wiping my comment history is important to me. I stand by all the comments I've made so nothing embarrassing to me or incriminating, but I want it all gone. The tools I'm finding via google seem to have been broken by the recent-ish api changes. Anyone have a current script or app that I could use to accomplish this? I can do this via Windows or Linux, just preferably not one comment at a time.
posted by nixxon to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

The major issue for me is that the tools that do work only go back to approximately 6 months of posting history, because this is what's accessed from your reddit profile. If you do a google search for your username and "reddit", you'll end up seeing a lot more not-yet-deleted comments from your account from further back than the last 6 months, because they're *there* on the fucking internet. I do not know how to solve for this. I am following your Ask with great interest.

FWIW Power Delete Suite is very good at editing and/or deleting the most recent 6 months of comments and posts.
posted by MiraK at 1:00 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you can get your account shadow banned, all your comments will disappear for everyone else. Then you can delete your account and they will still all be gone.
posted by rikschell at 1:57 PM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wonder if you might want to ask if mods can make this question anonymous?
posted by papayaninja at 3:24 PM on October 18, 2023

Shreddit was designed for exactly this. I have not used it but people I know have
posted by Dr. Twist at 3:36 PM on October 18, 2023

A few months ago I found out that one of the managers at my job is on Reddit, hangs out on local subreddits to read all the drama, and it was entirely possible she'd seen my posts about work there. I had to delete every work-mentioning post ever and I was easily able to find those posts and delete anything incriminating.

Going to https://www.reddit.com/user/(whateveryournameis) shows every post you made, and if you click on the "..." option, you can delete individual posts. I managed to find posts I'd made twelve years ago linking to a personal website that I was able to delete manually off that.

That said, no, I don't know of a tool to mass-delete everything you ever did, easy-peasy.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:55 PM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for the insights. Just a couple of responses: I don't really worry about being anonymous here. I'm careful not to say anything too odious online (if anyone has found an odious thing, I'd very much appreciate knowing about it!).

Also shreddit is one of the tools that is now unreliable due to the api changes. Grrrr.

So I guess I need to decide if I want to hit that satisfying, shiny, delete button now, or wait for better tools to be developed.

Thanks everyone.
posted by nixxon at 4:41 PM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]