18
votes
Looking for help scraping and deleting a Reddit account
I have a couple of old Reddit accounts I’d like to delete as fully as possible. However one of them dates back to my teenage years and it’s some of the only writings I have from that time. Any recommendations on good simple ways to scrape all the comments off of it and save them? Then what’s the best way to completely erase a Reddit footprint these days?
Looking for as simple a solution as possible, I’m not tech illiterate by any means but it’s also not a real strong suit for me.
Comments on your post or your own comments / posts? Because you can simply do a data request if you want every single post and comment you made in a nearly sorted zip file! Here's the data request link - make sure you select GDPR as that's as thorough as you can get.
As for deleting, there's scripts available you can add as a bookmark and then run - it'll overwrite all your posts and comments for you (and can delete them after). You want your stuff overwritten because reddit has a nasty habit of un-deleting mass-deleted stuff. If you overwrite your stuff first though and then delete it then if reddit restores anything it'll just be the overwritten stuff. Here's the link: Power Delete Suite (make sure you read the instructions thoroughly!!)
Edit: Minty's will work as well but Power Delete Suite is a lot easier to use, so I'd recommend that if you're not super comfortable with coding; For PDS just copy and paste some stuff as described in the instructions on github :)
I will add the caveat that the various Reddit archiving sites may not copy over the edits—especially if they're on decade-old comments. They also have a habit of being run by people who are judgement-proof from GDPR issues (a.k.a. neither live nor have assets in the EU). However, that's probably not the main concern. The goal is to be gone from the main Reddit.
Most of them, yes. Also, the OP seems more concerned with years-old content that would definitely be in the pre-2023Q2 archives.
Actually, I’m not sure if the one I use still gets new posts or if it’s a frozen archive: I pretty much only use it to search for posts that have a habit of being 4–10 years old.
You can still view the site while not logged in, so it can still be scraped. Now it might just be a bit less efficient.
Just adding that these scripts never worked for me very well, so do check the results. They did edit/delete most comments, but never managed to go back far enough and even before that time cutoff left out some comments (and posts) here and there for unknown reasons even with repeated attempts. I had to use some python script (maybe what Minty linked below, don't remember) which then worked with no issues.
No problems with reddit undeleting anything though, iirc that may have been a false alert due to the fact that you cannot see and access your own comments from subreddits that are set to private and you have no access to, which was happening all the time during the blackout, and as the subreddits gradually became public again, your comments made there suddenly reappeared.
My script has a no-CSV mode which is the standard mode for most of these scripts. It cannot delete everything at once per Reddit limits. With the CSV, and so a list of all commend IDs, it systematically eats everything. Probably fails at currently private comments, but the IDs should still be on the list, so a later rerun should mop those up.
As @noox said, you can request an archive of all of your data directly from Reddit using the GDPR form.
If you want to convert that data to a SQL database for easier viewing and manipulation, use this tool:
https://github.com/xavdid/reddit-user-to-sqlite
I don't have time now so just posting a link https://rentry.co/unreddit
Not sure if it still works. Worth a try. Let me know if something's unclear :)
A lot of old online content has been indexed by many different public "archive"-services of various kinds.
The way to ensure that people don't find the actual pieces of content you don't want online is to make un-indexing requests to online search engines, not to have the content scrubbed from the original site submitted to.
My experience with search engines is that they often remove the content from results, irrespective of source. Therefore the indexes don't appear in search results either. If someone were to go to an index site directly, they might find stuff, but their searches are often poor, and a lot fewer people will check those places as compared to just googling someone as part of due diligence for whatever they're trying to ever-so-slightly background check me for.
That's often quite a bit of work, so you'll have to be selective about what things you actually want to rid yourself of.
Yeah I don't have anything that sensitive out there. I've always been pretty careful, and I'm not really too worried about the archive side of things. It's just too much work.
Redact works well for deleting and overwriting comments on reddit. I used power delete suite before that til it stopped working for me.