It took several weeks but I finally got my Reddit data export for my account. If it wasn’t already obvious, the direct messages there are not encrypted in any meaningful way. One interesting variable I found was in the file named “statistics”, there’s a variable named “is_deleted” which is set to false. This makes me wonder if, when you “delete” your account, they just flip this variable to disable login but still retain all of your user data. The file names are pretty self explanatory on what they contain, but the if you’re curious, the files in the export are:
account_gender.csv
approved_submitter_subreddits.csv
chat_history.csv
checkfile.csv
comment_headers.csv
comments.csv
comment_votes.csv
drafts.csv
filelist.txt
friends.csv
gilded_comments.csv
gilded_posts.csv
hidden_posts.csv
ip_logs.csv
linked_identities.csv
linked_phone_number.csv
message_headers.csv
messages.csv
moderated_subreddits.csv
multireddits.csv
poll_votes.csv
post_headers.csv
posts.csv
post_votes.csv
reddit_gold_information.csv
saved_comments.csv
saved_posts.csv
scheduled_posts.csv
statistics.csv
subscribed_subreddits.csv
twitter.csv
user_preferences.csv
Of course they keep your data so they can sell it.
I got mine today too (well, apparently it was ready yesterday, but I didn’t download it until today) and I was struck that the “chat history” doesn’t have all my chats in it. I was in particular looking for the exchanges I’d had with a representative of a company working on a VR headset. I guess maybe the other party deleted them. But I found at the same time that the chat widget on the site no longer has any of my chats in it. It just has a “start a new chat!” button. Super weird. The site really feels to me like it’s getting more janky.
That might be expected? They just announced that chats/messages prior to January 1 2023 were nuked so you probably won’t see anything prior to that date.
See the earlier posts
https://lemmy.world/post/1481089 (from !reddit@lemmy.world)
https://lemmy.ml/post/2045081 (from !reddit@lemmy.ml)
What’s strange is that the articles claim a data request should still be able to get you that old data but I guess that’s not entirely true.
Oh, thanks. I had totally missed that. That probably explains the widget on the site. And, as I say, it’s possible the other person had deleted the chat I was looking for.
Just curious, did you note if you had any edited posts/comments prior to the data export? What did you receive in the export for those?
And if you had edited, then later deleted, posts/comments what ended up being exported?
I made no changes to any of my posts or comments, though I haven’t been particularly active on Reddit. It has been un-usable for a long time for me because it seemed like every time I tried to make an original, thoughtful post, it would get auto-deleted by a bot because I didn’t include the correct “flair” or some other non-sensical bull, yet others could just spam those same subreddits with memes and nonsense without issue. I would comment occasionally, but that’s about it.
It might be a good idea though to go through and check my comments to see if anything looks out of sorts or was edited without my permission.
I did a data request and then it took a while to receive my data, so I used power delete suite delete in case the API stopped working. Rewrote and deleted my comments.
In my file there was comments overwritten with the writing I had put in before it got deleted. It was gone but present in the data export. So seems it was at that time the data back up was done they were not deleted, but what was rewritten was present.
There were also comments and submissions that didn’t get deleted by power delete suite even though I can’t see them in my profile. So those I have to go through manually using the csv file to delete them. Trying to get shreddit working to automate that process.
Check out https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/50981/Reddit-Data-Retrieval-Request-timeline-thread if you haven’t already.
This makes me wonder if, when you “delete” your account, they just flip this variable to disable login but still retain all of your user data.
I’m pretty sure this is the case. At least within some short timeframe (say 30 days or something).
First, I’ve read on reddit about cases where folks had their reddit accounts hacked, and then the black hats deleted the accounts. But reddit was able to restore them.
Second, I got permabanned, so I eventually left reddit and deleted my account. However, if you try to visit my account, you see that my account is blocked instead of seeing the user deleted account message.
I’m disappointed any media I uploaded to Reddit is not also exported.
All my dank memes… 😢
Yeah my whole export was only like 3MB of CSV files, so I’m guessing that any media you upload just gets dumped into a giant bucket with everybody else’s stuff and then referenced by your post or whatever. Kinda makes you wonder if that stuff gets deleted if you delete your account.
