Especially if you have an old reddit account.
I have seen too many posts of users complaining about being permanned on their reddit accounts for flimsy reasons. Some of these users have account that are over 10 years old on reddit. If you make the decision to delete your reddit account, do the world a favour by deleting every activity you made on that account. I mean posts, comments, chats, picture uploads - take your time to clean up - 😉. This could take weeks depending on how much data you have amassed with that account, but in the end it is worth it.
If you simply delete your account, reddit holds onto these data. They will sell it, use it to train their AI models, basically using your effort for free after permanently denying you access to their services. Seeing how reddit is trending towards a bot-only outfit, even some moderators are bots, you do not want your data to contribute to that cesspool.
They can fingerprint all they want with data that does not exist. Good luck to them. Please play your part in dealing with the reddit bots/moderators that have found a way to steal your data from under your fingertips without you even knowing.
Sorry, I must be dense. How could you remove your activity if you were permabanned? Does that not include losing the account?
If you simply delete your account, reddit holds onto these data.
Uh… but you are not changing anything by individually deleting each post or comment, anyway. They still keep the data, and use it however they like, whether you delete the account or delete the posts.
Additionally, deleting your posts and comments does not change the fact that they have already been scraped and copied into datasets. Nearly the entirety of reddit text-posts and comments have also been archived and are available publicly as a legal torrent. Heres a link to a 4TB Reddit archive from 2005 to 2025 that anyone can access and download: https://academictorrents.com/details/3e3f64dee22dc304cdd2546254ca1f8e8ae542b4
EDIT: there was a more recent reddit archive that includes 2025 data, so I updated the link
I was going to say exactly this. I mean, additionally it’s someone still using reddit 2025/2026, so that’s that.
But then again, third parties scraping might be hampered by this. So why not. 🤷
As others have said, “deleting” your data from reddit does absolutely nothing to stop them using it. They’re not actually deleting it, just hiding it, and they’ll use it in whatever way they see fit and think they can get away with. You’d think it might stop third parties scraping it and then using it, but all your posts were already scraped within moments of you posting them, so retroactively hiding them doesn’t achieve anything there either.
The rule remains: if you post something publicly, you cannot call it back. It will, or might, remain out there in perpetuity.
In perpetuity until the courts say it’s not.
To assert that, you’d have to prove that every single copy of it, belonging to anyone, had been destroyed. If even one offline copy remains it could be put back online, courts or not
you only need to prove the one in reddit’s possession which is very straight-forward.
Not really. For one, how do you prove that they have expunged it from every backup, replica and server? For another, what you seemed to be concerned about was whether your creation would be used to train LLMs or otherwise be misused, all of which can happen from an “unofficial” copy that was scraped before you tried to remove it.
Also, oftentimes backups will still retain it up to their company retention policies. A good company will have immutable write-once read-many backups. You can’t go in there and purge data without destroying the entire backup and the chain of backups. And that’s even if you could delete the backups at all. Good backups will have object locks to prevent a malicious actor from just deleting backups when they encrypt your data.
Do not just delete your activity ! Replace everything with utter nonsense first.
this is the way!
Would it matter? Would Reddit ACTUALLY delete your data?
Press X to doubt
One: Deleting a post most likely marks it as “user deleted” or similar in the database. It’s how you can still see the post in the ui and comment chains, just with a blurb saying it was deleted. The original content is likely still in that row, it’s just got a boolean column for isDeleted.
Two: Editting is almost entirely the same. New row in the database with a column for parentCommentID which causes the website to show that over the original. The original might have a column for childComment or isEditted.
Three: Reddit TOS probably says they have a license to do whatever the fuck they want with your posts and comments. Unless you’re in a place that has data governance laws like the GDPR, they have no obligation to delete your data.
But you can still delete all your old posts to make it hard for real humans to troubleshoot old problems using reddit! 🤔
I wiped my data a few times and I can find my stuff when not logged in. As far as I can tell wiping the data seems to just be for the view of your logged in user.
Agreed. I wrote up a massive piece on ankle sprain rehab as I was doing a meta analysis for school at the time. I eventually deleted it years later because I was getting pestered for free medical help. I continued to be pestered. There are some scripts that replace the content but I expect reddit keeps copies of the backups too.
deleted by creator
It takes time for deleted data to be deleted.
If they refuse to delete your data upon your request, then they have a law suit coming up
oh its definately not that. I did it several times over a period of the first year moving here.
Uh, what? If you’re permabanned you cannot log in anymore. You can’t make changes to your account. That’s the whole point
I still use my permanently suspended account. I can sub/unsub, save posts and RES still works. I can’t comment or message people.
HAve you tried logging in after a reddit permaban?
The point of the permaban is that reddit no longer wants you to use their service. What they conveniently leave out is your accumulated data which stays with them. I mean if reddit deems you unnecessary, then they should get rid of your data, but they will not. They use it to make money. A permaban is an inconvenience to you, but free money for them.
Yes. That’s usually how you find out. You cannot log in. At all.
many users can log in. If you can not login and want to delete your data, Reddit must delete that information. It is data you created and it does not belong to Reddit. Not allowing you delete data you created on their website is Reddit begging for a lawsuit.
Dude. You have no clue wtf you’re talking about. Like seriously, stop.
HAve you tried logging in after a reddit permaban?
Yes, have you?
Like many Lemmings, I came here after my perma-ban on Reddit. Not only can I no longer log into any of my old accounts, I also got insta-banned on any new accounts I attempted to create.
that’s strange. You should be able to login to your permanently banned account and delete your data. Reddit is stealing your content if they prevent you from making changes to your data after a permanent ban.
You are so naive it is incredible.
For me, while they removed my ability to log in, they also removed all my posts and comments from the site, so there isn’t any need to do that myself.
good for you!
It doesn’t matter, they’ll put it all back up. They retroactively claimed ownership of your content.
I came here from reddit. I fully deleted my account but did not delete any posts or comments (mostly comments, just like here). Whenever I commented on reddit is was throwaway stuff. No one would keep that BS for posterity and I’m sure as shit that they won’t use my words to further their descent into the dystopia they have already started creating.
In doing so you might also find gem posts that you want to preserve - these could be migrated to a fediverse “museum”/archive instance, to the internet archive, or just saved to your PC. I know there was a whole lot of interesting stories and advice posts on Reddit which should be kept somewhere safer than Reddit. Reddit might not exist in 1-5 years time. Just a hunch.
Or rather, parts of the internet will become wastelands trawled by AI eating it’s own tail.
