How to Delete Your Reddit Account
Reddit feeds all user comments and posts into Google’s virtual crusher, meaning the recovered mass of your conversations will be spat out by Google’s AI language models. This move, according to Reuters , costs the social network $60 million a year.
After reading this, you may want to delete your Reddit account and everything in it. After all, Reddit isn’t much fun anymore—and not just because they killed off the “Reddit is fun” line last year when they killed off all of Reddit’s good customers . The truth is that the old Reddit is becoming less important, in part because in the past year the company has seemed openly hostile to the site’s moderators and writers who maintain the site. The company’s upcoming IPO, based on the history of other social networks, probably won’t improve the situation.
But deleting your Reddit account is not enough. Follow the official documentation , and all your posts and comments will remain on the site—they’re just not associated with your account. You might want to make all your messages disappear forever to avoid them being repeated by any large language models masquerading as general purpose AI. You may also need your own backup of your messages. Here’s how to get that backup, delete your messages, and finally delete your account for good.
Back up your messages
You probably don’t want to lose all the comments and posts you’ve made over the years. Reddit allows you to query Reddit data – go through this process and you’ll receive a ZIP file full of CSV files including all your comments, shares, upvotes, and more.
To get started, log into Reddit and go to the data request page . You’ll be asked what this request is – if you’re in the EU or California, you can use the relevant laws and Reddit will have to send you the information. If not, Reddit offers an “Other” field that still works. Specify which dates you want or request all your details, then click Submit .
You will receive a notification that your data is on the way and that you will receive a private message from Reddit when the data is ready. I only had to wait a couple of hours to receive the information. The archive is a ZIP file full of CSV files that can be opened using something like Microsoft Excel. Blogger Daniel Rosehill has a great blog post that describes what’s in the file if you want more details.
Delete all messages and comments
Now that you’ve backed up your comments and posts, it’s time to delete them. The bad news: Reddit doesn’t offer the ability to mass delete your comments and posts. They suggest simply going to your profile page, clicking the three dots to the right of such messages, and then clicking “Delete” for each one.
It’s okay if you only have a couple of posts, but longtime Reddit users likely have many more. There are many tools that allow you to bulk delete old messages. The best I’ve found is Reddit Nuker , a Chrome extension that has two buttons: Delete Posts and Delete Comments . Click any of them when you’re logged into Reddit and the extension will do all the work for you.
Please note that due to API restrictions, this extension can only delete 100 comments or messages at a time. Once this limit is reached, the extension will pause for a minute, after which you can press the button again to continue. It’s a little annoying, especially if you have thousands of messages, but trust me: it’s much less annoying than deleting everything one by one.
If this isn’t automated enough, there’s another Chrome extension, Bulk Delete Reddit Posts , which can delete 50 posts and 50 comments per day for free. What’s more, it costs $9.99 one-time, but it doesn’t force you to play the same waiting game as Reddit Nuker. Both tools have received good reviews, so it’s up to you to decide.
Delete your Reddit account
Now that you’ve backed up your comments and posts and deleted them from Reddit, it’s time to delete your account. Go to your account settings and scroll down. You will find a Delete account button.
You will be asked why you are leaving Reddit – you may or may not answer (I recommend using AI to create a long essay, just ironically, but I’m a big jerk). You’ll need to enter your username and password, check a box to indicate that you know your data can’t be recovered, and that’s it: you can click the Delete button and your account will disappear completely. You are free.