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Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets

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11–20 of 26 posts

Re: Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets

#11

Unfortunately it's not actually possible to delete reddit comments from being publicly searchable. There are several independent projects which continuously retrieve and store every single comment. For example, PushShift[1] constantly crawls reddit for all new comments and posts. Their entire corpus of historical data is freely available for download. There is even a free service to search through any user's entire c…

That only matters as long as those services are alive and people bother to keep the data.

So, basically forever. Services may come and go, but someone will have the data.

Re: Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets

#12

Unfortunately it's not actually possible to delete reddit comments from being publicly searchable. There are several independent projects which continuously retrieve and store every single comment. For example, PushShift[1] constantly crawls reddit for all new comments and posts. Their entire corpus of historical data is freely available for download. There is even a free service to search through any user's entire c…

That only matters as long as those services are alive and people bother to keep the data.

The pushshift data sets are downloadable.

Re: Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets

#16
post #8
post #4

I have previously used Shame Eraser [0] for this, which uses your Twitter Archive [1] to get all of the status IDs so you don't run into rate limiting problems. I was able to delete 87k tweets in a few hours a couple years ago with it. Is this software just as fast? [0]: https://github.com/benjaminjackson/shame-eraser [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-dow...

Wow, I didn't even think about using a twitter archive to delete everything. This will help me get around the 3.2k API limit problem I was experiencing. I'll work on integrating this.

would this work for likes as wlel ?

Re: Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets

#17

I do agree with the premise to the point that I built a Reddit-like thing that has this natively at 6-month mark. (Link in profile) This is probably where all social platforms will eventually end up, whether they like or not.

Its just security theater though. Every popular website has scripts saving every comment that gets posted as well as users manually mirroring content to archive websites. The real solution is anonymity. You may regret saying something stupid years ago but who cares if no one can link it to your present self.

Re: Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets

#18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I didn't even think about using a twitter archive to delete everything. This will help me get around the 3.2k API limit problem I was experiencing. I'll work on integrating this.

would this work for likes as wlel ?

I will have to check and see if the twitter archive also stores likes/retweets

Re: Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets

#19
Reddit should ban these kinda tools, a lot of useful threads become unreadable. Maybe some tool to dissociate your identity from the content made by reddit itself would be better.

Usage of this kinda tool always smacks of "screw you guys i'm going home" to me, i invariably have to resort to some sort of undelete/wayback service focused on reddit to see what the thread conversation was about esp when it was about a technical topic/ info only that niche community care about(a recent one i had was about rha headphones, half the thread was full of these "i deleted my reddit presence coz reasons etc etc" comments

Re: Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets

#20
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool idea, but no Linux support and only Twitter and Reddit? Does it work by simulating user activity? I'd be worried about anything using the API that would trigger some internal alert/archival due to thinking it is a bot trying to remove evidence. I think the biggest thing to keep people safe is not to post under their real identity, and try to use a service (VPN, proxy, etc) that doesn't trace back to you. Web bro…

It's built in Python, it's pretty simple for a Linux user to run it (I have instructions on the readme that explain how to do so from the command line). I just haven't built an executable for Linux because of how many different Linux OS there are out there in use. And yeah, only Twitter and Reddit right now, the next plans are to get Instagram working with this.

Don't forget the evil Facebook too, please.
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