I check my Reddit profile every few months. My old posts are back again. Must be the third or fourth time since I left the platform.
Right now I’m running PowerDeleteSuite to purge my profile. I’m so tired of this garbage that I’m starting to lean towards sending a GDPR RTBF request just to stop having to redoing this every few months.
Former DPO here. The “right to be forgotten” doesn’t actually mean they have to delete the content of your posts unless it renders you identifiable. Anonymisation is more or less equivalent to deletion under the GDPR, which is why they can get away with replacing usernames with [deleted] when you delete your account.
That is… disappointing. Seems like next time they resurrect my comments, the best thing to do is to replace the content with phrases generated by an LLM. Let the Ouroboros eat its own tail.
Most deletes on any sites are only going to put a flag on your comment like delete=“true” and just hide them. At best they get purged at some point or overwritten with new comments if database space gets low.
All that to say: any clean I do is always an edit first to make it nonsense. Then give it a day just to be safe and let the database propogate to any backups. Then delete.
i tried modifying my comments to make them nonsensical; but i had been commenting on reddit between 2007 and 2023 so my history was too long and it made me wish that the other projects like powerdelete were more sophisticated when it came to detection since a deleted comment or post is easier to notice that a modified version.