• forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    FYI: reddit orphans content. In other words your posts/comments are undeletable.

    I found instances of such late last year by way of search results. I clicked a username to see more posts by that account. The only content on their profile page was a final deletion message about the API changes.

    Their post history was discoverable by using “<username> site:reddit.com” on Google. All of their posts/comments still show up under their username instead of the normal [deleted]. Clicking the username takes you to their empty profile page.

    So what we know from this now is that reddit has been saving original submissions. Whereas before their claim was that only the last edits are stored. Which is why the deletion scipts became a thing. People took it on good faith that we could delete our posts. At some point they stopped doing that. Or perhaps it was all a lie the whole time. Who knows.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      What happens if you edit every other post with absolute nonsense sentences? I doubt they have a way to go through that?

    • RoosterBoy@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      No, that’s Google keeping the content of the pages they scraped at the time they scraped them.

    • mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk
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      10 months ago

      This is how I cleaned (most) of my old posts: Searched them via Google. As they’re posted under my username I was able to change them into nonsense before deleting then. Even though they never appeared under my profile anymore.