As I write this I literally have a script ( https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite ) running deleting all posts and comments I made so I can delete my accounts and leave them with nothing. The last couple of days they have been prompting people to provide identification documents to access their accounts. This is going to start becoming more prevalent on platforms. I always hated the site but that’s crossed the line for me. So purpose of this post is just to give people a heads up while they still have access if they want to remove their data and / or delete the peice of shit from their life once and for all.
you should all know that reddit can, and has, restored comments that have been “shredded” by tools like this so they can be used to train AI. they can obviously restore deleted content as well, because it’s never deleted, just marked as deleted in the database.
Welp, i was signed into old reddit, and now it’s flipped over to new. Fuck spez.
And goddamn, but the ads are out of control.
does it delete the posts in the backend?
I left because the suspension and bans were for the most mild shit. It’s not a site meant for children , yet they treat it like it is. I’m not trying to harass people or anything, but I should be able to type the word “ass” without a suspension or ban. Nanny site
Dropping redact here to reconnect for if you’d like to take it a step further. This caches copies of all your comments and posts for you on your personal device while editing all your reddit interactions to unusable garbage.
No more LLM training material
Maybe edit posts instead to garbage. They don’t know and it can mess up AI training.
Your deleted posts are still archived and actively being used to train AI and being sold to 3rd parties. Reddit has that data forever. All you are doing by deleting them is denying actual humans access to them.
So the site becomes less useful to the masses, this can only help it die faster.
I don’t think actual humans really care about my opinions much
All you are doing by deleting them is denying actual humans access to them.
Okay, and? Actual humans using Reddit still directly profits Reddit and reinforces its hegemony. OP is still making a small but direct impact regardless of how entitled you ostensibly feel to their work.
Exactly, it’s still important to take that content down
I really think it’s nice that you’re trying to contribute positively, but I’m also a little bit exhausted after watching people post these kind of tools from almost a decade. Because it gives people false hope, and it continues to underscore the false belief that this somehow has the result that you programmed it to have.
You actually cannot remove anything. And reddit will just revert your posts… They’ll all say “deleted user” but they will not show the “vandalized” comments they’ll all go back to the way they were. The automated tools to detect/prevent people doing this damage on their way out have been in existence for more than 10 years.
Literally the only way is to stop using the damn product.
As I write this I literally have a script running deleting all posts and comments I made so I can delete my accounts and leave them with nothing
Hello. A former DevOps here. When you upload something to a web platform, chances are it’s going to stay there no matter how badly you try to “delete” or “edit” it.
This is due to the way database for social media platforms are engineered. When you click the “delete” button, the record is simply marked as “hidden from view” rather than effectively deleted (in order to illustrate this, picture a sheet of paper written with a pen; the so-called “post deletion” is merely that pen adding a cute “hide this” text at the bottom of that sheet; the sheet of paper still exists, and so does everything that was written to it before).
This script you’re using does nothing too special; it’s simply programmed to try and mass-“edit” (also won’t effectively edit the original records) before clicking the “delete post” button in a controlled, timely manner (so not to trigger Reddit’s bot detection algorithms). At no moment it have access to the physical data centers controlled by Reddit, so you can’t possibly edit/remove the posts from their database entries.
Whoever controls this database (Reddit admins and their automated systems) can revert the database entry and voila, the post is public again, regardless of your will.
Even if the record were effectively removed from the database entries, it wouldn’t be able to remove from the backup files. If the database were fused with the old backup, your post would be up again.
Also, chances are your posts are already part of the mathematical mashup comprising the weights of LLMs out there; in order to make the LLMs to “forget” your posts, it must be trained all over again with a training data containing none of your posts. And of course the clanker corporations won’t do that, at least not out of their goodwill.
The only way to hopefully get Reddit (and clankers) to actually forget your posts, is by invoking things such as GDPR’s “right to be forgotten”. Reddit may not respect your will when you click a decorative “delete post” button, but they have to comply with things like EU laws, or they’ll face legal consequences for not doing so. Although… you’d likely need a lawyer in order to enforce GDPR’s (or your country’s equivalent law) clauses. Needless to say, I am not a lawyer, it’s just that this matter requires a legal solution rather than a technical solution.
While all this is true, it’s still worth it to edit/delete the content, so reddit doesn’t continue getting value from showing it to other users
I think their point is that Reddit can revert edits and deletions, and they’ve been known to do so.
From what I can tell they have not done that with the posts I deleted a few years ago, so I would still recommend trying.
Exactly.
I probably would’ve noticed if they hadn’t banned me two weeks ago for unspecified “actions taken by my account” less than a week after I resurrected a sub for parents/caregivers of kids with a rare disorder.
So… Good riddance I say.
There’s also a Firefox extension that can delete everything. Set up is just a few clicks.
I’d love to see some stats on the drop in active users after each of these sort of blunders they’ve pulled.
They just fill them back in with more bots
And traffic too, since they’ve begun to require login. I have no idea what they are doing? But it seems to include panicking. 🤣
Users are never allowed to delete anything. Whatever you submit is theirs for as long as they want to keep it.
Hell, they grab whatever you type, whether you submit it or not.
How did you learn about the typing? Somebody said the same thing to me about Lemmy when I first got here but for data transfer over the internet that would be crazy
It’s stupidly common and easy. Practically any text field can be made to capture and cache “unsent” data, because it’s not actually a standard text field that only does POST when you submit, but rather something that is continuously polled (usually AJAX) and the data saved to whatever database tables they got set up for it.
Wonders of scripting.
NoScript will stop it, but then the platforms that rely on this bullshittery for ill, usually are the kind to try to force you into having JavaScript or worse enabled.
Some examples of this I’ve seen/used in the wild:
When I worked at a credit union, the last upgrade to the “online banking” towards Lumin(link to their marketing site in case you want to see their screenshots, almost no CU/Bank who uses them bothers to customize it) the then “hot and new” vendor platform that was hot then amongst digital banking solutions for small to midsize institutions, uses it on every text field.
E.g. the search omnibar input from atop the accounts where you can search help topics, and the input from the fields around the FAQ sections (input meaning both sent queries and anything typed but not submitted) were all visible to the call center folks, with strings like “user typed ‘how do I hide my 10k deposit through mobile banking’ into [field name] but did not submit”, as these were expected to be data for the reps to use in their servicing or whatever.
Another (much bigger) example: The omni bar at Google.com specifically (and I have no idea how many in their Android apps, but given that they have more control there than over your browser I’d just assume every single one…Google Keyboard included).
If you get yourself through all the trouble and effort to somehow arrive at search site unknown (your customized FF privacy fork is really fucking good or something) and for some reason need or allow scripting on their page and type ad targetty helpful info but never search…it’s still gonna make it into whatever shadow profile they’re prepping for linkage to the real you ASAP, and eagerly wants to personalize those ads with your unsent data.
My own community writing website:
It came bundled with a Xenforo add-on I used for some stupid feature I wasn’t smart enough to do myself 5-7 years ago. I don’t run any sort of ads or tracking whatsoever on my site, so it’s pretty much useless.
