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.
@anon Reddit is known for bringing deleted comments back, without your consent. That’s especially bad for people who also delete the account, because they have no control anymore (I mean even less). Pretty scummy. More people should be aware of this issue.
It looks like that’s the case. I found a comment that was mine from 10 months ago. It looks as if Reddit recovered my deleted comments after I deleted my account.
At this point, I don’t care. I left all that behind.
Is it possible the sub was private when you deleted the comments? This and known, since-fixed issues with PowerDeleteSuite explain nearly all of the “undeleted” comments I’ve looked into in-depth.
I used redact.dev and confirmed on reddit.com that all my comments were deleted well before the blackouts.
I’m not familiar with redact.dev and can’t comment on its accuracy, but your comments from earlier in this thread make it seem like you only found out about how the limitations of reddit’s profile page work about 11 hours ago. They probably weren’t deleted to begin with.
That’s right, they were most likely never deleted in the first place, despite Reddit’s indication to the contrary.
Can you show this indication? Otherwise, this looks like a pretty clearcut case of user error.
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.
One thing I’ll mention is to try actually clicking into a post if you see it on a Google search. Web indexing systems like Google may take time before they drop old links. If it’s still there when you’ve clicked into it, there’s still more to clean up.
Yes, it’s not just just the search engine’s web crawler lagging behind in updating its Reddit index. Following the links takes me to the actual comment, on Reddit, under my username. There are dozens of them, some very old, some recent. Yet the Reddit Profile > Comments page shows I have none left. So even Reddit is not internally consistent.
it’s look like the google cached your comments, just waits a few days and search your username again
It’s not just the search results, it’s the actual comments, on the Reddit website itself, still visible under my username. Despite redact.dev reporting a complete wipe weeks ago, and the Reddit profile > comments page returning zero result.
I only used Google to do a sanity check weeks after the deletion, and found all those leftovers that even Reddit doesn’t report to me as being still there.
