Apparently they don’t store an edit history for each comment. So if you delete it, the comment still exists on their servers marked as deleted. So technically they could decide to “undelete” everything.

But if you edit the comment, they lose the ability to restore it. Many tools offer the ability to edit your comments to gibberish before deleting them.

it’s probably the best option to edit it to a short message explaining why you deleted it and where you moved to. This provides more context than simply deleting them.

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

Right, that's exactly my plan. I'm hearing good things about Redact but I haven't used it yet.

[–] ShadowCatEXE@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I've used it, and it's It's fairly simple. You sign in with Reddit, choose either posts or comments, apply any subreddit filters you want, choose the delete method, and off you go. If you have a lot of posts or comments, it will take quite some time, but it will get it done.

It also lets you edit the comment to a specified value before deleting it, which is nice, since it's a soft delete. The content remains in Reddit's database and is just labelled as "deleted."

I've not used it for any other services.