I just spent all day today fighting with reddit, trying to get all my comments deleted/overwritten: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/45417/Anyone-have-experience-with-deleting-comments-to-see-older-comments#entry-comment-190482
It's not just me, someone else reported the same, though using a different tool: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/46805/Strange-phenomenon-while-deleting-my-comments
Basically, reddit has the most ridiculous api ever! A 1000 limit on viewing .. well basically anything. Try to go further back, and you can't.
The tools and scripts and websites we are using to delete, they are hitting that limit and can't go past it. My own reddit is only 5 years old and I hit this. I imagine that many folks where, the ex-redditors who had 12, 17 year old accounts, you probably didn't get everything on your way out.
Unless of course, you had a data retrieval request made to reddit, and reddit responded with your data. Only then are tools like shreddit and websites like shreddit.com able to completely wipe out your history. Or else you knew about this somehow already and used an external manager like eternity - https://github.com/jc9108/eternity - to save a copy of your posts before they got lost to the 1k limit.
Worst of all, it's explained that deleting items does not rebuild the list - so you can't see the older stuff by deleting newer stuff.
I'm hoping that private/public transition is an exception to this and it'll rebuild my lists when that happens. Maybe then I can go far back enough to delete everything.
Edit: Nope, someone confirmed in a comment below that this doesn't happen.
Also looks like pushshift is not an option, as pushshift was shut down last month, https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13mhuzq/api_has_been_taken_down/ - and under the new deal, regular users won't be able to use it when it opens up for business again, only approved moderators can (and likely only for approved reasons) if i'm understanding https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancing_communityled_moderation_an_update_on/ correctly.
Cool. As long as the goal is accomplished.
That said the 1000 limit applies to your profile too. It will look empty but you can still have things that got missed, unfortunately.
AFIK, or at least as Reddit has said in the past, the 1K limit should roll backwards as you delete recent content from it. It's a display limit to prevent data usage through scraping, not a hard limit on the database.
Can you find the cite for that? What I found from hackernews (and saw something similar on a subreddit that was supposed to be from a reddit dev itself) says differently. More like an index limit than a display limit.
It's neither. It's an index limit. The older messages are still in the database, but they won't appear in listings, because those are built from indexes.
Yeah, that's how it looks to me as well. Thus far I've not seen anything older come back into my indexes after deleting.
I've noticed this by googling my username and finding reddit comments still present that don't show up on my profile.
Yeah, I did the same and then handled those manually. (I could have probably just grabbed the URLs and found a script to scub them but I had few enough that it was probably faster to do it by hand in my case.)