I just spent all day today fighting with reddit, trying to get all my comments deleted/overwritten: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/45417/Anyone-have-experience-with-deleting-comments-to-see-older-comments#entry-comment-190482
It’s not just me, someone else reported the same, though using a different tool: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/46805/Strange-phenomenon-while-deleting-my-comments
Basically, reddit has the most ridiculous api ever! A 1000 limit on viewing … well basically anything. Try to go further back, and you can’t.
The tools and scripts and websites we are using to delete, they are hitting that limit and can’t go past it. My own reddit is only 5 years old and I hit this. I imagine that many folks where, the ex-redditors who had 12, 17 year old accounts, you probably didn’t get everything on your way out.
Unless of course, you had a data retrieval request made to reddit, and reddit responded with your data. Only then are tools like shreddit and websites like shreddit.com able to completely wipe out your history. Or else you knew about this somehow already and used an external manager like eternity - https://github.com/jc9108/eternity - to save a copy of your posts before they got lost to the 1k limit.
Worst of all, it’s explained that deleting items does not rebuild the list - so you can’t see the older stuff by deleting newer stuff.
I’m hoping that private/public transition is an exception to this and it’ll rebuild my lists when that happens. Maybe then I can go far back enough to delete everything.
Edit: Nope, someone confirmed in a comment below that this doesn’t happen.
Also looks like pushshift is not an option, as pushshift was shut down last month, https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13mhuzq/api_has_been_taken_down/ - and under the new deal, regular users won’t be able to use it when it opens up for business again, only approved moderators can (and likely only for approved reasons) if i’m understanding https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancing_communityled_moderation_an_update_on/ correctly.
It’s not an API limit. It’s that they only index the most recent 1000 items. That applies to your comments, your posts, I think even posts within a subreddit. The limit applies separately to each listing, so sorting by new might find a different 1000 than sorting by controversial.
As you discovered, they don’t re-index old messages when you delete new ones. But you can still reach your older posts if you can find them some other way than a listing, like in search results.
Pushshift was a good way to find your old messages, but it stopped working for me when Reddit cut off their access. I think the best way now is to make that data request.
Ok, looks like the pushshift shutdown broke the script. I still have one other shot - my comments are from dec -2017 to may 2018, so i think hopefully would be included in this dump, available as a torrent from archive.org - https://archive.org/details/pushshift_reddit_200506_to_202212
Jeez, that dump is going to be huge. Wish they’d say how big it was, I question if i have a big enough disk to whole all of reddit up to 2022…
Yeah, that’s what I meant - index limit.
Wish you had been around earlier - I specifically asked this before deleting my newest comments, and mostly got the impression that this would make my older ones show up. So far, 24 hours and nothing.
Someone else on this thread suggested a script using pushshift’s API to find older stuff and then delete thru reddit’s api. I’m going to take a look - hopefully that still works (the ones past the 1k limit are more than five years old so hopefully aren’t effected by the cutoff, seeing as pushshift must have it’s own database).