Three Things You Should Do Before Deleting Your Reddit Account
Reddit is in turmoil. The company decided to make the existence of third-party Reddit apps prohibitively expensive after June 30, which its users didn’t like . If, as a result of these events or anything else, you are threatening to delete your Reddit account, there are a few things you need to do first.
Export your data from Reddit
Reddit, like other social media platforms, allows you to request a copy of your data at any time. You will find this option on the company data request page, where you can select the relevant options you want to receive. If you live in Europe, you can request data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and if you are in California, you can choose the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) / California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) ). If you live in a different region, just select “Other”. Then select “I want my Reddit full time data” and click “Submit” . A download link for all of this data will appear in your Reddit inbox .
You can also use third party tools like reddit-user-to-sqlite or Reddit Media Downloader to download things that may not include the official data query tool, or just download your data faster. These tools won’t download your private messages, but all public data should load fairly quickly.
Check and save deleted Reddit posts.
If your posts or comments are not in the data archive, you can check if they have been deleted. Tools like Reveddit and Unddit can help with this. Unfortunately, these tools are no longer as useful as they used to be after Reddit banned the pushshift.io service that helped these tools recover deleted posts and comments. But Unddit can still help you see content that was removed before May 1, 2023, and Reveddit is still useful for showing content that was removed by moderators (but not by users themselves). You can use these services to find some of your old deleted posts and comments and make copies of them.
Delete all your Reddit data and delete your account
The last step before deleting your account is to clear all your public data – deleting all your posts and comments from Reddit. After all, Reddit makes money from content created by its users. If you object to Reddit’s decisions or policies, you can make it difficult (or impossible) for the company to profit from your data by deleting everything you’ve ever posted. Also, if you no longer intend to use the service, you may not want your past posts and comments to be visible to the rest of the community.
While Reddit doesn’t make it easy to clear all your data at once, you can use tools like Power Delete Suite to delete your data. Once you’ve done that, you can permanently delete your Reddit account , safe in the knowledge that your years-old posts will never see the light of day again.