cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1180367
There are tools out there that help with this, but the better ones like the one I linked use the API.
I don’t know what will happen to them next month, but if you are thinking about it, keep in mind that they may not be around or work like they do today, and you may have to use other more convoluted tools.
They are going to be selling this data to big companies with deep pockets who can easily fork out the cost. Companies looking for new datasets to feed next generation AIs. So if you don’t want them profiting off of selling your content (comments/posts) over and over, then delete them.
Are there any guarantees for Reddit that things that are deleted are actually deleted from their servers? One of their biggest assets is the data that they hold, If I were in their position and trying to maintain some value with a significant portion of my user base leaving scorched earth I’d be holding on to that data just removing it from the public facing application.
I doubt there are any guarantees about anything you delete from the Internet ever being really deleted. There are websites that are dedicated to saving comments so they can be seen after being removed or deleted. Certainly reddit could backup everything and only delete the live data. But deleting it from live is all we can do. For me, it’s about principle, not privacy. I never really shared too much there, only used it about 9 months.
Deleting it decreases the risk of people outside of reddit easily being able to scrape your history, although obviously there are tools out there that archive basically everything that’s posted so nothing’s guaranteed to be erased from the whole internet. There’s a 0% chance that when you “delete” a comment on reddit it’s actually being removed from their backend, it’s just being hidden from public view.