I’d been using Reddit for 6 years; thousands of hours. All gone, in a quick(ish) running of a script. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. Link rot is gonna be so much bigger soon. And everything that represents a mark on the platform from me will be gone.
I remember spending time on basically every interest I’ve had on there. I remember the memes, the political discussions, the anticipations of football transfers, the stunning source-gathering work on the Ukraine war, the shitposts, the communities willing to help me on the most stupid of questions. The hours spent defending random pixels on a canvas modified by other communities with friends, the awestruck silence of the Snap both in movie form and Reddit form. The support for me as a person when I needed it the most and real life couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t give to me.
And in a few minutes, that’ll all be gone. It’s already going away as I type this. Almost feels like a microcosm of my own mortality. Maybe I’m being overly sentimental, but it hurts. Anyone else feel the same?
How effective is it to delete? Didn’t reddit restore the posts / comments of deleted accounts to avoid losing content?
So I deleted all my posts and comments 4 days ago now, and they have stayed deleted. I’m thinking if you leave your account active for a while afterwards, it doesn’t trigger the “undelete” action, if it was ever a real thing. It was highly possible that peoples stuff they thought was being undeleted, was actually just the result of more private subreddits being opened back up. Content you have in a private subreddit will NOT be deleted, as it can’t be accessed.
Some things were definitely restored / not deleted tho. I’ve spent a week manually deleting all of my posts and comments until reddit displayed “this user hasn’t posted anything” and “there seems to be nothing here” two days in a row, then also used shreddit which found a whooping 981 MORE comments to delete, and then I nuked my account the next day after (!) checking that it was still empty.
… but now I can find a bunch of my older comments again. They’re no longer attributed to me (“posted by [deleted]”) but the content is still there. And that should not have been possible considering that I both manually deleted everything reddit chose to show me AND used a program that allegedly nukes everything.