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Comment by callalex | Hacker News Reader

This seems very illegal in some places.

I don't think that reddit is "backfilling." I don't have time to check right now, but I suspect that PowerDeleteSuite goes through your profile to find things to delete. Your profile is limited to showing 1k entries. IIRC that's the top 1k according to whatever ranking you're using, so you could get some more comments by re-running it sorting by top, controversial, etc, but if you made a lot of comments PowerDeleteSuite just won't be able to find everything.

Profile is 2k as it is a combination of both the 1k comment/post listings, iirc.

It may not be backfilling, but I can confirm that my user profile is not showing comments that exist elsewhere on reddit.

Sorting by "controversial" does, though, show new comments that weren't on the main page. So you might be on to something.

I played with the python PRAW package to scrub old comments a while ago. Even iterating through the different sorts (new/hot/controversial/etc) I could remove everything there, but different comments would appear there after some time.

My theory was Reddit ran batch jobs on some cadence (daily maybe?) to generate the topN comments lists for each users profile page. Running my script a couple of times over a several days seemed to clear everything.

I bet that their TOS covers that anything you submit belongs to them.

I'd love to delete old comments on HackerNews but I can't so I'm pretty sure that Reddit could take away the delete button tomorrow and nothing would change.

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