Lee DunaReddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data
just_another_personOur data, you mean?
gregorumwell, not mine. i used a script to replace all of my comments with gibberish before i deleted them and then my account. if they went back and restored my comments, then all they’ll get is comments full of gibberish, especially since i overwrote them 3 times before deleting them, just in case they tried to roll back to the previous version.
have fun with that!
I like your style, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep every single version.
i bet they do now, but i’ve checked back now and then, and all of my comments and posts are most assuredly gone.
edit: i’ve gone back to check some old haunts, place i know i’ve commented, and i did some seaching with google using my old usernames, as google uses its cache to match to the posts\comments, even though they’re not there any more.
i see old posts that are graveyards of deleted comments, some with simply deleted accounts, and many others where both the account and comment are deleted. i don’t see any gibberish comments. the ones i know are mine (because replies quote the comment above, which i recognize as mine), are all just deleted in their entirety, so it seems they didn’t do comment versioning, at least not past the first edit. i see no posts under any former username of mine.
the efforts to scrub my content from reddit last May appears to have worked. sadly, since the API lockdown, those tools no longer work.
If you request your data, which they do have the option for, you will unfortunately see that a lot of your comments were preserved. But I did comb through it, and a good chunk of mine were successfully replaced with the gibberish.
i mean… i overwrite them 3 times. and, before deleting the account, i verified that they’d been overwritten multiple times. and they’re all gone now.
exactly how would i go about requesting that data anyway? my accounts have been deleted.
Unfortunately, if you actually deleted your account, there is nothing you can do to access that data. I’m pretty sure we both ran the same script - “nuke Reddit.“ I ran it probably every four months for a few years and then I ran it several times right before the API change. I can tell you with certainty that some of your comments are still there. I also ran that one everyone recommended during the API fiasco but I can’t remember its name.
That being said, you probably we’re able to knock out a lot of it. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. We’re lucky we can even do that much. Most social media sites you can’t get rid of anything no matter how hard you try.
Feel good knowing that they aren’t getting a single cent more out of you
I did do it a couple of weeks before the API policy change, so I have a bit more confidence that they were really deleted. I know that they made some backend changes right before the API policy change, which prevented such actions from being permanent. I really did go back and look through past posts in past comments even from many years back, and my comments really are very much gone. Sure, I can’t go and see all tens of thousands of them, but spot checking from a year ago all the way back to nine or 10 years ago, they’re all gone wherever I’ve looked.
But you’re right, they are not going to get one more cent out of me, in time or effort. Thank goodness I never actually gave them any real money.