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.
Just tell them you live in the EU and you want to exercise your right to be forgotten, therefore you want them to delete all the data they have on you permanently. They’ll comply, trust me.
Also you can first download all the data they have on you, as required by the GDPR, if you want to backup some of it.
This sounds illegal
Shit, this made me look at my okd account and sane thing happened. I wish I was in the EU, I could report them for ignoring my deletion request (I actually also asked for the user to be deleted)
I find it very funny to think of how aggressively Reddit was banning people, particularly back in 2016. And how algorithmic they got in censoring and shadowbanning certain comments and accounts.
But now that real human interactions are more valuable than gold, they’re trying to reverse it all again.
I know there are some databases of all Reddit comments prior to… maybe 2015? I forget. Would be cool to port them into an open source clone that isn’t profiting off them, just for the times comments were really useful, like solving a tech issue only a couple people had ever documented.
At one time, Reddit (or at least the core server) was open source. Statistically, it’s relatively likely that someone, somewhere forked and is maintaining that code for their own purposes to this day, but I’m not actively aware of any examples.
If someone has been maintaining a fork, I’d love to see the old comment database imported into it and made available, though I don’t know offhand what license either the code or the comments were released under.
A FOSS Reddit, without the chaos that took over America during the presidential administration installed in 2016, and branching from there, would be an interesting point of diversion to say the least.
Edit: quickie DDG search found me one fork archived in 2023 and a further form updated a year or so ago. That’s recent enough the damn thing just might build with a little work.
2023 fork of open source reddit
I’m sure there are others…
