Reddit Migration

Is this something you would be able to share with others when it's finished. Or put it on Github and people can make suggestions or changes?

Close.

Each of Reddit's listings (top submissions, recent comments, etc.) is generated from a database index. Those indexes are limited to 1000 entries, by dropping older ones as new ones arrive, and they don't re-index for deletions.

That means that once a listing goes over 1000 items, the oldest items can no longer be found through it. The messages are still in the database somewhere, but can only be reached from some other index (different sorting order) or a search or a direct link.

So, the messages are not being deleted and then restored; they were never deleted in the first place, because the deletion tools have no way to find them.

This is why a formal data deletion request is often more effective than a tool.

Interesting - do you have more details about that? I would expect the “top 1K” query to show the leftovers, which would have become the next most top/controversial/etc after the original top 1K got nuked.

It looks like that's the case. I found a comment that was mine from 10 months ago. It looks as if Reddit recovered my deleted comments after I deleted my account.

At this point, I don't care. I left all that behind.

Don’t understand why people are surprised that a private company would like to hold on to your data and keep it active no matter what you want or think or do.

Maybe because reddit literally says they will allow you to change this on their privacy policy?

https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy

Your Rights and Choices
Accessing and Changing Your Information
You can access your information and change or correct certain information through the Services.

anything you do there is just adding to their monetization of your activity … the best thing to do is to do nothing

Well, saving a copy of your content, overwriting it, and then deleting it - I don't see how this leads to additional monetization. It's actually better than doing nothing because it prevents further monetization.

Ditto with deleting of accounts (as opposed to deletion of content) vs abandoning of accounts. The latter means that reddit can inflate their number of accounts in some ways, etc.

FYI for those who are worried that they aren't covered by a law like the GDPR/CCPA (or even PIPEDA/LGPD/CPA/VCDPA) and that reddit might not give it to them, I came up with a way to get a similar list (bypassing the limits) here, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the

This is very good to know, thank you.

Weeks. But it’s not just Google returning obsolete results - when I follow the links, the comments are still there, on the Reddit website, under my username. I’ve clarified my post accordingly.

I dont think getting banned will remove posts and comments from your history that haven’t been flagged as rule-breaking. All that will happen is that your banworthy comment will get deleted and you’ll lose access to your account, which is the worst outcome because then you can no longer manually delete your history.

I was permabanned but everything was still there, nothing was deleted. I still had to use a combo of a script to delete things plus manual deletion.

It’s not just the search results, it’s the actual comments, on the Reddit website itself, still visible under my username. Despite redact.dev reporting a complete wipe weeks ago, and the Reddit profile > comments page returning zero result.

I only used Google to do a sanity check weeks after the deletion, and found all those leftovers that even Reddit doesn’t report to me as being still there.