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.

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[–] Kaiser@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] mtnwolf@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] ultimate_question@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.