• Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Me, who completely nuked twelve years worth of Reddit posts and comments which were often one of, if not the only relevant search result to an extremely niche problem.

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
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      7 months ago

      Oof yeah. Finding a reddit thread with your exact query as the title, getting excited to see a comment, aaaaand… It’s “This comment was deleted by EliteUltraEraser Premium TM. I value my privacy,…”

      (I do get it though. And who knows, maybe this will actually help in the long run and not just lead to increased usage of Discord communities so ask the same thing over and over and over again because they aren’t fucking publicly searchable god I hate what Discord has done to the searchability of issues in the tech space?)

    • scops@reddthat.com
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      7 months ago

      Depending on how you nuked it, reddit might have just restored the comment behind your back. My reddit account shows 0 posts/comments, but a month ago I got a reply to a comment in a post I made five years ago providing instructions on how to get a game working in Linux.

      • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        Yup, I occasionally get replies on posts over a year old that don’t show up in my history because I thought I deleted them.

        Edit your posts. Don’t delete them.

      • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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        6 months ago

        Nah, reddit restoring comments is a myth. You just didn’t delete all your comments, even though probably you thought you did.

        See, Reddit, being the duplicitous bitch that it is, doesn’t really show you all your comments when you go to your profile. It’s limited to your last 1000 (?) comments or so, any comment that goes beyond that horizon is gone from your view forever, but it still exists in the thread.

        The way to solve that is to first do a GDPR request. After a few weeks you will receive a zip file containing a file with all your comments and a link to it. You can then use an overwrite and delete tool and point it to this information. It will likely run for several hours or even days, depending on how many comments you made, because reddit throttles edit and delete requests, but it will effectively delete everything.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Nothing is 100% but my comments were first replaced with excerpts from books in the public domain, twice. Then I went back a third time and replaced the comments with gibberish, then delete. Most of the comments I find still active are just the excerpts from the books. They read like plain English, so it is very difficult for an AI, or even a contractor, to pick up on the fact that it is worthless.

    • BilboTBaggin@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yeah that’s really unfortunate :( worth it though I’d say. Just gotta build the knowledge base back up in a better place :)

    • Gigasser@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Maybe one day instead of [Insert Search Query] Reddit, it will instead be [Insert Search Query] Lemmy

      Edit Addendum: Might be cool if people got their old tech support posts from reddit, ask the question that was asked in a post, and then answer their own post with the answer that they gave that solved the issue.