Your deleted Reddit comments are still readable! (Privacy 101) — nobetterdan.com

We’ve all said things we don’t mean, right? It could be something out of anger, something too revealing, or something you just regret later. We’ve all been there, I know I have, especially on Reddit!

I’m going to assume you’ve heard of Reddit — if you haven’t, then this post may not be applicable to you. The hugely popular social news aggregator is currently ranked #19 most popular in the entire world, according to Alexa Top Sites. Alongside the sharing of social news stories, Reddit also provides people with the ability to post comments, creating the possibility for discussions to take place.

And, if you’ve spent enough time online, then we all know that these can get heated and you can often say things you don’t mean — or later regret. Or just that you might share too much information about yourself than you intended.

So, you might decide that what you want to do is delete your Reddit comment.

And that’s all you need to do, right, the comment is gone…? Right?

Unfortunately not. These comments can still be recovered using browser add-ons/extensions and third-party scripts. Don’t worry, I’ll go into this soon enough.

What do you do then? Well, we’re going to use similar techniques to ensure that even if they are recovered, they can’t be understood.

We’re going to use one method in particular here: Reddit History Sanitizer

Related: Relax before posting something you regret. Learn how breathing properly can help calm your mind.

Reddit History Sanitizer

Things needed:

Installing Reddit History Sanitizer

When you’ve installed your chosen add-on/extension, proceed to install Reddit History Sanitizer from Greasyfork. If you’ve got Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey successfully added, you should see an install button when you visit Reddit History Sanitizer.

I personally use Tampermonkey, so that’s what I’ll use for this example.

First, left click on the Tampermonkey icon in your chosen browser and select Dashboard from the menu.

This will bring you up all scripts that you currently have installed. If you followed the steps above, you should see Reddit History Santizer appearing here.

Editing the code

Now, we’re going to take a look at the code first — I don’t understand a lot of it, but I’ll explain the parts that would be good to know. To do this, tap on the edit icon under Actions.

This will show you the code that makes up the script itself:

It looks like a lot, doesn’t it? Don’t worry — we’re only going to be editing one piece: const age =

You’ll see that my “ const age = “ is set to 10. The number you put here defines the time-frame in which you want to keep comments. That is — right now mine is set to 10. Once the script is doing its thing (we’ll get there, don’t worry), it will keep all posts that are up to 10 days old.

I personally like to have mine set to 1 day, so that’s how I’ll do mine.

When you’ve made your changes, hit File & then Save from the menu.

Running Reddit History Sanitizer

Now it’s time to run this script!

Before we do anything, you need to make sure that you first log in to your Reddit account & ensure you’re using Old Reddit (it doesn’t work with the current Reddit layout).

Next, visit your profile by clicking on your username on the top right-hand corner.

If you’ve got a keen eye, then you would have noticed on the code below that it is looking for *.reddit.com/user/*

When you visit your profile on Old Reddit, then the script should automatically kick-off. If you watch it, you’ll notice that it is updating your comments that are older than the number you entered with weird symbols and letters.

What’s happening here? Great question! It is randomly filling your comments with utter garbage. These are randomly generated alphanumeric.

Now, how long this takes will depend on how many comments you have. Once it has finished scrubbing all your selected comments, it will give you a prompt telling you that there are no more old comments.

So what was the point behind this?

Great question, yet again!

If someone comes along to try and recover your comment (it is still recoverable, remember — we can’t stop that), all they’ll see is what Reddit History Sanitizer replaced it with:

Rather than the potentially incriminating, embarrassing, or cringy comment that was there, all they’ll see is a random assortment of letters, digits, and symbols.

And there you go.

You have just completed your first Privacy 101. I’ll be posting more of these, so make sure you check them out!

Originally published at https://nobetterdan.com on June 5, 2021.