Note: Reddit switched to archiving posts older than 6 months by default many years ago. Individual subreddits can opt-out of this behavior. If they have not, you will not be able to edit/remove your comments or posts there.
Moderators can turn archiving on or off in subreddit settings. That dictates whether someone can comment or not comment on posts older than six months.
Can you explain the 6 month thing to me? If I understand correctly, posts/comments older than 6 months get deleted, unless you decide to save it locally? Even if someone saves a post older than 6 months locally, others cannot see it, right?
That does not seem like a feature to me, and completely breaks geteather imo, sadly. Most of the good content on reddit is older than 6 months. Imagine if reddit decided to delete posts older than 6 months, jesus, every 6 months there would be a flood of the very same questions/posts/comments...
I think it's been a long time, if ever, since the editing-before-deleting worked on Reddit. Why wouldn't they store older comments/editing history? Even if they don't have them in the main DB, they will of course still remain in backups, snapshots etc.
I’ve never created an account on Reddit, but in general, I’m surprised to hear they even allow editing older content. Most discussion-based/social media sites have logic that locks the comment after so much time (often some timespan less than 1 day), and only allow deletion after that point.
I would also be surprised if Reddit didn’t add such logic if they figure out this (editing older content to replace it with gibberish) is happening. It seems like reasonable logic to have in place anyway.
To be clear, I’m not siding with Reddit on this. Just saying it seems odd they even allow it in the first place, especially for comments — the top level post may make sense to allow edits, but even then there’s usually a publicly visible edit history.
You can edit or delete any of your posts at any time.
Until recently, you could reply to or vote on any post or comment less than 6 months old, regardless of the age of its parent. A recent change prevented voting or commenting on any thread where the OP is at least 6 months old, even if the comment you want to interact with is newer than that.
Only within a certain timeframe. Unlike reddit eventually your comments are no longer deletable or editable by you, and you have to email the webmaster in this case to ask for an old comment to be manually deleted, its not even an automated mechanism.
Bad news: it depends on how you delete your comments. If you just delete your comments via the delete button, Reddit will still archive your last 1000 comments and posts. Not sure how shreddit and other similar apps work, but I think you need to update and replace your old posts with something blank like a space before you delete them. My knowledge might be out of date, so feel free to point out that I’m wrong.
Don’t know if this is still the case but back when Reddit was open source they would keep the comment in the database on deletion, but using the edit feature you could actually remove the content from the db.
I'm against deleting old posts. You only have to look through some threads on Reddit to see how disrupting it can be to delete random posts in a comment thread.
Deleting accounts would be ok, if it leaves the comment trail intact.
There's a python script[1] (long abandoned) called shreddit that allows you to delete old comments. It first wipes out the comment (edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you choose), then deletes it. Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments.
Someone rewrote shreddit in Rust[2]
I'm currently rewriting it in JS for Deno. Still in early stages so not worth posting the mess that it's in now.
As soon as I'm finished with mine I'm going to setup a cron job and have it delete any reply older than a year (with some exceptions you can set either by subreddit or by comment ids). I don't have any comments about pirating so I'm not worried about that, but I also don't think comments on social media need to last forever, especially with all of the data-mining being done on them (remember Cambridge Analytica). I think something similar exists for Twitter and Facebook but I don't remember their names at the moment, maybe someone here does.
I've got a decade old account on which I've made a habit of manually deleting comments older than 6 - 9 months, since they get so little visibility and there's no value in leaving a breadcrumb trail.
Checking just now I see that comments up to 3 - 4 years old have been restored.
I'm not going to speculate as to why (beyond agreeing it's more likely to be incompetence than malice) but in my case at least there are definitely long deleted comments that have been restored.
> Repost deleted/removed information. Remember that comment someone just deleted because it had personal information in it or was a picture of gore? Resist the urge to repost it. It doesn't matter what the content was. If it was deleted/removed, it should stay deleted/removed.
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