TL;DR: even if your delete script confirms a full wipe and your Reddit profile page shows zero comment, there may still be comments left over (that you can find through a search engine and delete manually on Reddit).

Weeks ago, I used redact.dev to delete all my Reddit comments (thousands of them over 10+ years). Redact.dev confirmed a full wipe, and my Profile > Comments page on Reddit confirmed I had no comment left.

Yet, as of today, Google still returns dozens of results for “$myredditusername site:reddit.com”. It’s not just Google’s crawler lagging; when I follow those links, those comments are still visible on the Reddit website, under my username, where I have the ability to manually delete them.

Thankfully, I hadn’t yet nuked my account, because I knew of other users whose deleted comments got reinstated (although that was thought to be caused by the deletion script exceeding the API rate limit; supposedly a different case, as those missed comments would still show in the Profile page).

spez: edited for clarity.

  • RoboRay
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    1 year ago

    Reddit is broken. It’s not unusual for some of your comments to get disconnected from your account profile and not show up there anymore.

    They still belong to your account so you can delete them from the actual thread… Just not from your profile.

    It’s been this way for years… Just most people don’t notice because they don’t try to clear out their entire history.

    • DarkThoughts
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      11 year ago

      Or when replies to a now removed comment ended up as top level comment, making reading the comments sometimes super confusing. Reddit’s backend is probably nothing but spaghetti code. Hence why the redesign & mobile app are both also such piles of garbage. It would likely need a complete rewrite, but they probably don’t have any sort of way to do that and maintain all the old legacy content. That’s also a good reason to go closed source, especially if you want to become a traded company. Investors are probably not having the hots for garbage code that everyone can look at & criticize.