Used a script to overwrite old comments to finalize my switch to Lemmy, and got this message from one of the subreddit that i commented.
Yes my intention is to annoy and create awareness. After i delete my account, Reddit is not going to get to keep my pearls of wisdom, or shenanigans. I hope more people edit their old comments to something like [moved to Lemmy].
Are the automated tools still working? I couldn’t get them to work on the last few weeks of comments in my remaining account.
There are tools working purely from the browser in Javascript. That’s almost impossible for them to block those. The only thing they can do is detect events and react to it.
And then cry when people browse Reddit through archive.org, where they can’t display ads.
I remember an article (or maybe it was a comment on an article) from a supposed former reddit dev a couple weeks ago that their database caching for user comments doesn’t actually keep track of every comment you make, beyond a certain point older items will be dropped off the list as new ones are added. So for old accounts, not everything will be listed when looking at your comment list, which is how these tools usually work. The comments are all there in the database obviously and can be loaded when opening a page, but the cache for your account only allows X number of items to be referenced with old items dropping off as new ones are added. When you go to your account comment list it just looks up that cached reference list, it doesn’t actually search the database for everything. So on an old account it will have a lot missing because things have fallen off that reference list. Wish I could find that article of comment now to reference though.
this does seem to make sense, power delete suite removed some 1300 comments from my account, but gdpr request contains some 9500 in my case
IIRC, it’s 1,000 comments. But, I cleaned my accounts regularly and switched to new alts every six months, so I just need to overwrite ~50 comments and a couple of posts made since the start of June.
It’s a tiny bit laborious but doable.
Unfortunately, for folks who waited to overwrite and wipe until after the API changes, I haven’t seen any mass-delete tools that are still working.
I wrote a simple updater that uses your GDPR request data to drive a browser automation tool (Puppeteer) to update your entire account history. It’s in Dart and should be easy to adapt into other languages https://lemmy.world/post/959507
The 1,000 comment limit refers to your profile - each of the New, Hot, Top & Controversial lists max out at 1000 comments. So when you use tools like PowerDeleteSuite they use these lists, and when they’re done they won’t have gotten everything.
To get everything you need to use the GDPR files which include links to every comment. Shreddit used to be able to take these, however I imagine it doesn’t work anymore with the API change. You can still use the links manually to go to each older comment and edit them, and maybe someone will modify PowerDeleteSuite or some other tool which works via website scraping rather than an API key.
There’s this if anyone needs a starter: https://lemmy.world/post/959507
Now, if only reddit would actually reply with my GDPR requests…
It took them a worryingly long time to process mine, but they did reply just before Fleddit day, so I think it’s incompetence rather than conspiracy.
No I had my reply pretty quickly in May. Now, they’re just stalling.