Deleting a post is simply marking a piece of text so nobody sees it, but I think the text is still stored in their servers.
Furthermore, a large company like reddit, must backup regularly, meaning there must be several copies of my posts in several SSDs. If the backup once a day… some of my posts are 5 years old.
Companies exist to make money. I suspect they just marked my posts not to be readable by anyone, except staff and they can still monetize them.
Am I wearing a tinfoil hat way too often?
I’ve been meaning to ask this elsewhere but I guess I can piggyback off this post-
What tool(s) are available for deleting/removing your post history? I’ve seen mention that some didn’t delete their posts but had a bot or something replace the text in them with some text about leaving for Lemmy, and I’d like to do something like that myself.
I haven’t kept up with anything reddit wise but I thought those tools utilized the now inaccessible APIs unless they’ve figured out how to do it without them.
I think the tool I used was doing it via a browser extension, you opened your account up and gave the extension access and it did its thing.
Do you happen to remember the name?
I used Power Delete Suite but I had to modify it a bit to put in a delay of about 30-45 seconds for each comment as I was editing the text for each one prior to deleting.
Took quite a while, but in the end my account was gone. I’m sure reddit could pull stuff from it if they really wanted, but no user facing options exist - even “deleted reddit comment viewers”.
Edit: I will say that I’m unsure if this still works (or any editing tools) because of the API changes.
What is a reddit?
Ancient history. Really it was a Silly Place.
Let’s not go there, on second thought.
I doubt your history is on SSDs specifically, but yeah, I would assume they have it, even after I used Power Delete Suite and completely closed my account. They gave backups of posts/comments before they were edited.
The whole reddit API change was about controlling and monetizing their massive dataset for LLMs like ChatGPT. They are going to keep “your” data because we all signed it away after skimming past the Ts and Cs.
