Used a script to overwrite old comments to finalize my switch to Lemmy, and got this message from one of the subreddit that i commented.

Yes my intention is to annoy and create awareness. After i delete my account, Reddit is not going to get to keep my pearls of wisdom, or shenanigans. I hope more people edit their old comments to something like [moved to Lemmy].

  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    I remember an article (or maybe it was a comment on an article) from a supposed former reddit dev a couple weeks ago that their database caching for user comments doesn’t actually keep track of every comment you make, beyond a certain point older items will be dropped off the list as new ones are added. So for old accounts, not everything will be listed when looking at your comment list, which is how these tools usually work. The comments are all there in the database obviously and can be loaded when opening a page, but the cache for your account only allows X number of items to be referenced with old items dropping off as new ones are added. When you go to your account comment list it just looks up that cached reference list, it doesn’t actually search the database for everything. So on an old account it will have a lot missing because things have fallen off that reference list. Wish I could find that article of comment now to reference though.

    • skillissuer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      this does seem to make sense, power delete suite removed some 1300 comments from my account, but gdpr request contains some 9500 in my case

    • ChrisLicht@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      IIRC, it’s 1,000 comments. But, I cleaned my accounts regularly and switched to new alts every six months, so I just need to overwrite ~50 comments and a couple of posts made since the start of June.

      It’s a tiny bit laborious but doable.

      Unfortunately, for folks who waited to overwrite and wipe until after the API changes, I haven’t seen any mass-delete tools that are still working.