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Reddit is in turmoil. The company decided to make it prohibitively expensive for third-party Reddit apps to exist after June 30, a move that hasn’t gone down well with its users. If these events—or anything else—have you threatening to delete your Reddit account, there are a few things to do first.
Export your data from Reddit
Reddit, like other social media platforms, allows you to request a copy of your data whenever you want. You’ll find the option from the company’s Data Request page where you can select the relevant options you’d like to retrieve. If you live in Europe, you can request the data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or if you’re in California you can choose California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) / California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). If you live in other regions, simply select Other. Then select I want data from my full time at Reddit and click Submit. The download link for all this data will appear in your Reddit message inbox.
You can also use third-party tools like reddit-user-to-sqlite or Reddit Media Downloader to download things that the official data request tool may not include, or to just download your data faster. These tools won’t download your private messages, but all public data should download fairly quickly.
Check and save your deleted Reddit posts
If your posts or comments are missing from the data archive, you can check if they’ve been removed. Tools such as Reveddit and Unddit can help with that. Sadly, these tools aren’t as useful as they used to be after Reddit banned the pushshift.io service, which used to help 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 to show content deleted by moderators (but not by users themselves). You can use these services to find some of your older deleted posts and comments, and make a copy of these.
Delete all your Reddit data and delete the account
The last step before deleting your account is to scrub all of your public data—removing all of your posts and comments from Reddit. After all, Reddit makes money off content created by its users. If you’re against 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. Plus, if you’re not going to use the service anymore, you might not want you past posts and comments exposed for the rest of the community to see.
While Reddit doesn’t make it easy to scrub all your data at once, you can use tools such as Power Delete Suite to delete your data. Once you’ve done that, you can go ahead and permanently delete your Reddit account, assured that your years of posts will never see the light of day again.
