Last night, I used Redact to delete all my comments, then altered the settings to make an exception for one and only one subreddit. To check if I even had comments left in that subreddit, I kept an eye on my comments through Infinity. At first the comments were being deleted one by one, then suddenly it showed a “No comments found” screen half-way through the deletion. So I looked through a post in that subreddit where I entered a discussion, and it turns out that my comments there were still up, despite my comments tab showing nothing. I then checked RiF and it didn’t show my comments through my profile. Today (after having deleted everything), I checked through my comments in my post in another subreddit, and it turns out they were still up, despite the fact that I didn’t make exceptions for it. Still found no comments through my profile.
Folks, it’s not that Reddit is undeleting comments or anything. I fought this all day today (see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/45417/Anyone-have-experience-with-deleting-comments-to-see-older-comments#entry-comment-190482 ) and I figured out exactly what is happening.
Reddit is so dumb! They have an 1000 limit (on posts, comments, saved, etc). See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17647915 and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42940262/getting-more-than-1000-search-results-upper-bound-with-praw and even in PRAW’s own docs, for example in https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/v3.6.2/pages/getting_started.html
Any single reddit listing will display at most 1000 items.
So what happened is that redact.dev can only delete the most recent 1000 comments of OP. But those subreddits have comments from OP beyond the limit, which no longer display in OP’s own profile/comment views.
https://shreddit.com/ reports the same thing but they are more open about it.
They explicitly say that you need to give them an archive upload (from reddit’s data retrival request) in order for shreddit.com to delete everything.
About six months back I requested my data dump just out of curiosity, to see what it had about me. Even though the form says “allow up to 30 days” it came to me almost immediately, I seem to recall it was just a matter of hours.
About a week ago I requested another data dump, this one to be my nostalgic “that was my Reddit career I guess” archive. It still hasn’t come through. Either their systems are genuinely so poor that they’re being overwhelmed and can’t generate all those data dumps being requested now, or more likely they’re stalling in an effort to prevent exactly this sort of activity.
Sadly I expect that we will all get them within that 30 day window - on day 39, after the new api pricing breaks these tools.
