Replacing My Old Posts in Protest of Reddit’s Privacy Policy
Has anyone thought about changing all their previous posts and comments to something like, "This has been deleted in protest of Reddit's privacy policy. Please use lemmy.world instead"? Will I get banned from Reddit (not by mods) if I gradually change my previous posts?
Maybe if you mention Lemmy it’ll get banned but I used a service to overwrite all my account’s posts at once and the account is still active, albeit unused.
hi what service u use?
This.
I did the same. Replaced all my comments with junk. Got banned from one sub because of this (something along the lines of 'your comment is nonsense, we don't allow this on our sub') but who cares - the account is still there but inactive.
It was a browser extension, if I remember correctly, which clicks through your comments one by one and changes them.
Over 7 years of comments deleted. And I'm happy I did it. Suck on that, Gemini.
Man, reddit users sure don't change, do they? DAE have this incredibly popular opinion? Has anyone thought of this very obvious idea?
Teasing aside, you should be able to find multiple options on how to do so with a simple google search, or a search of old posts in this very community. Terms like comment scrubber or account wiper.
This was incredibly common during the first big "exodus" of reddit users when they started cutting off third party api access, killing nearly every third party app and almost all moderation tools.
I'm honestly shocked you haven't seen any of those "replaced" comments yet. They're pretty common in any reddit thread more than a few months old that shows up in google search results.
It will most likely get you banned before you replace all of your comments, and if you somehow have a popular enough account where the reddit employee admins care, they can revert your changes after banning you. They did this with a large number of accounts during "the exodus", where people went back a week later to find their comments restored and they couldn't log back in to do antthing about it. Some users attempted to get their comments removed after that via GDPR requests, but I'm not sure if anyone reported back on if that worked or not.
I've overwritten a significant portion of my comments several times (never got to do all of them because it took hours with the script waiting between the edits becaause of the "you're doing it too fast" message, and it had 12 years of comments to work with), and never got the ban.
but everything else in your comments stands, lol
I know that even if you try to manually delete all of your comments, Reddit figures it out and then stops showing you any of your posts, and acts like they deleted them all. Edit: I went back to check and make sure I am not full of shit. Yep, I managed to get through 3 years of posts before they started acting like my account has zero post history. But anything from 4 years back can be easily found googling the username. I have to admit, going back and reading my post history kind of made be feel like a smart funny guy.
reddit used to only show a certain amount of comments (1000?) sorted by each category when checking an account (1000 newest, 1000 most voted, 1000 most controversial and so on), so your old comments wouldn't show up that way but would still be visible in the threads they were posted in. a few months ago they've changed that and now you get to see all of them.
Mine would be, this account was banned for criticizing Elon Musk because spez is a chode.
https://github.com/Jelly-Pudding/ereddicator/
this might work, good luck folks
Rather than removing entirely, it would be great if we had a community where we could just upload our top comments to, and then redirect users from Reddit to your comment on a Lemmy instance.
On Reddit users would see something like:
This has been deleted in protest of Reddit's privacy policy. If you really want to know what was written here, please see my comment on this alternative service here: https://piefed.social/post/740543#comment_6045217
Using pie fed here because it's (probably?) less likely to be caught by some Reddit automod filter, I think other redditors might be attracted to it more, I've heard they abstract votes* to a different account from your actual account (slightly more privacy that way), and it's good to spread out user bases among the fediverse instances.
You could do something similar with your top posts. Just repost it to the appropriate community and then edit the post on Reddit to redirect there through pie fed.
*Edit: Pie fed only votes with anonymous accounts for you when sharing votes with an untrusted instance. So not quite as privacy oriented as I had originally thought.
Those cheeky gits! My comments are un-shredded :/ I replaced all of them with a generic "deleted" a few years ago...
You'll get banned and then your comments restored, speaking from experience.. I didn't edit my comments i just removed them btw..