I logged in to Reddit today

https://lemmy.world/post/1064032

I logged in to Reddit today - Lemmy.world

Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial. I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite. It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion. The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from. I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later. I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content. That IPO of theirs is going so well.

The reason people keep claiming posts are being "restored" by Reddit or "missed" by these tools is that those posts were deleted while many subs were private. Which means the posts/comments were hidden. When the subs came back under restricted/public, then hidden posts/comments became visible again.

On top of that, it's been alleged that Reddit's weird caching limits the display of your posts/comments to a surprisingly low number (I've seen 1000 and 5000). Meaning stuff older than that is simply not locatable other than through third-party search tools. I haven't seen concrete proof of this, though, and I definitely saw 12yo comments being found and deleted when I ran tools on my account. It IS, however, clear that Reddit does not respect data privacy laws that require they delete all posts on a user's request. They demand the user do it themselves while simultaneously not providing tools to do so.

I have subs where I had some posts/comments deleted and others not. (I know because I was the originator of the post, which was deleted, but some of my comments in it were not removed).

I have comments spanning and wide swath of time still floating out there.

Fun times.