What does HackerNews think of Shreddit?

Remove your comment history on Reddit as deleting an account does not do so.

Language: Python

#45 in Python
There's a python script[1] (long abandoned) called shreddit that allows you to delete old comments. It first wipes out the comment (edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you choose), then deletes it. Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments.

Someone rewrote shreddit in Rust[2]

I'm currently rewriting it in JS for Deno. Still in early stages so not worth posting the mess that it's in now.

As soon as I'm finished with mine I'm going to setup a cron job and have it delete any reply older than a year (with some exceptions you can set either by subreddit or by comment ids). I don't have any comments about pirating so I'm not worried about that, but I also don't think comments on social media need to last forever, especially with all of the data-mining being done on them (remember Cambridge Analytica). I think something similar exists for Twitter and Facebook but I don't remember their names at the moment, maybe someone here does.

1. https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

2. https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit

I've done a lot of research on deleting reddit data recently and there are some important things the reddit community should know about reddit data and actually deleting it.

The most important thing is that 99% of reddit deletion tools out there (in fact all I have found except for two) do not actually delete your reddit data.

Most of these tools rely on the last 1000 posts and comments listed on your profile but do not delete any other comments or posts you have made and even then, most of these do not edit your comments and posts before deleting which means those 1000 posts and comments are still stored on reddit's servers.

To completely remove your reddit data, I have found only one way and that is with reddit-shreddit [0]. Despite its name being extraordinarily similar to another popular reddit deletion tool called Shreddit [1] which doesn't actually work, it is entirely different. reddit-shreddit works by taking the data from a reddit GDPR data request which includes links to all your posts and comments and editing and deleting each and every one. With this method, reddit-shreddit does not need to scrape posts and comments from reddit to know what to delete. It can leverage the official GDPR-compliant data request from reddit ensuring all of your posts and comments are known and are deleted. If you wish to confirm they are actually deleted, you can submit another data request to verify all of your posts and comments are gone from reddit's servers. It may also be possible to remove your data from reddit with a GDPR request but I'm not sure. I haven't looked into that.

Although you can remove your data from reddit's servers, that does not mean it is gone. Ever since reddit was created, people have been scraping and archiving it. The most popular reddit archiving service is called pushshift and it has archives for every year of reddit up to 2015 when it started archiving every month. Pushshift runs the API that powers this website and other popular reddit tools like removeddit and the former ceddit. Luckily the developer has been known to delete your data if you request it. I've seen it mentioned on reddit that you can email him or pm him on reddit and he will remove your data. Unfortunately all the archives from previous years are still floating around the internet outside of pushshift but at least your data will disappear from the largest source.

[0] https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit

[1] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

I've had Shreddit[1] on a weekly cronjob for the past 3 years and i think most if not all of them still shows up here...

[1] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

If you use Reddit and want to delete your comment/post history I would recommend Shreddit[0] for the reason you mentioned[1]. It's important to do this frequently because there are quite a few sites out there that cache Reddit content periodically.

[0] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1dhw2j/reddits_privac...

For people who use Reddit, deleted comments only remove the username and not the content, making it trivial to trace back the original poster. If you delete posts/comments regularly use Shreddit which overwrites the content before deleting it making this trace back much more difficult.

https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

Yeah, there is definitely this trail of well-documented cringe that gets left in everyone's social media footprints.

I'm going to take a contrarian view that this is not necessarily something that we need or want to keep associated with ourselves. There are groups like Archive Team and IPFS who talk about how ethereal components of the web cause vanishing history and a lost cultural heritage, while neglecting to note that the web is first-in-its-kind because it makes pedestrian, routine conversations to be transcribed and accessed from all over the world.

In olden times, even personal letters would generally include significant news or interesting updates, and these were never intended for a non-personal audience. The high cost of committing information to a fixed medium like paper, as opposed to the ethereal domain of air in which conversation naturally abides, would cause self-selection that made for only the elements considered most significant by the authors or artists to be committed. I am not convinced that archiving every comment or writing that gets published is a necessary or even beneficial part of preserving a cultural heritage. In some cases, like Geocities, the benefit is obvious, but I doubt the value of treating every conversation or exchange as a prized historical artifact.

There are several reddit auto- and back-deleters already. Check out shreddit [0], which I've used with some success in the past, and which can be configured to retain certain high value posts (posts above a user-specified score threshold or that have been awarded gold). I think it's good to keep this running on a continuing basis so that unless the comment is exceptional, only the last few months of comments are available.

This is particularly important/valuable if you have any slightly controversial opinions on anything. Over the years, it's easy to accidentally leak a little information here, a little there, and when a psycho decides to go on a vendetta against you because you insulted the species of grass they just installed in their front yard, it's too late to go back and plug those little leaks.

[0] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit