And just as a note, none of these tools can guarantee that they actually delete all of your comments. With Reddit's API, there's actually no way to get all comments. There's a limit to how far it will go back.
Unfortunately it's not actually possible to delete reddit comments from being publicly searchable. There are several independent projects which continuously retrieve and store every single comment. For example, PushShift[1] constantly crawls reddit for all new comments and posts. Their entire corpus of historical data is freely available for download. There is even a free service to search through any user's entire comment and submission history[2]. This includes deleted comments and deleted users.
I'm late to the discussion here, but I use shreddit. It edits and deletes all my past comments.
However I found recently there are websites that have every single one of my old comments accessible and I'm sure reddit itself does to. Once you comment it's there forever.
Suppose you have a comment at a given URL, say XXXX, an the wayback machine crawls it. Later you delete it so it's gone. It will still be at the wayback machine. So while web crawlers may discard data from an earlier crawl of a specific URL, they are likely to keep the data for a URL that subsequently vanishes.
This isn't to say that one shouldn't be able to delete one's comments, but in an open and distributed system you'd need to track down all the copies, and it seems there is no way to know you've got them all. And if you can find a copy, there's no guarantee that the host will respect a request to delete it.
These are difficult questions, and I have no solutions. Having said that, I don't think that being able to delete comments here is really that important or desirable. I respect that others will disagree with that.
There's also a backup copy in Utah with all your comments from every site tied to common selectors like your usernames, emails, passwords, ip, credit cards etc. No doubt that'll leak at some point too.
> There are web crawlers that retrieve the data and store it, then making it available to everyone.
I agree, but also people may quote your comment, repost it in another platform like facebook or tweeter, make a screenshot, print it in a newspaper, make a t-shirt, ... Once the comment is out there, deletion is only an illusion.
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