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Comment by UnpossibleJim | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a Python script to delete my comments every other day to take care of people pulling small quotes out of context and attacking me for it, or worse what boards I posted to and gatekeeping me based on that alone.

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So in other words you never write anything worth keeping. People deleting themselves is massively annoying and a major dick move to the rest of us who have to guess what was said to understand the context.

Maybe he wants some control over what a large corporation keeps about him.

Just don't give them anything then. What he's doing now is like handling the corporation a piece of writing on paper, letting people take pictures of it, then grabbing the paper back, ripping in up and dropping the paper thrash on the street. It doesn't serve anyone.

This is a great example of why they had to write a python script to delete comments to prevent getting attacked later. People want to throw fits over everything

So what? What other people may chose to do is their issue. Dicks are easy to ignore, but don't be a dick to others in order to prevent potential dickiness reaching you.

Wow. I feel like this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, at this point. I delete all of my comments, popular and hated. Equally. I don't pick and choose. There's a 48 hour clock on it. No one cares about a conversation 48 hours later on Reddit... No one cares 12 hours later, really. But if you want to think I'm a "dick", because I only give someone 48 hours to have my opinion on Reddit, well I'm old enough to live through that =) message boards don't have to be as permanent as they want them to be.

> No one cares about a conversation 48 hours later on Reddit

I do. All the reddit threads that I look at are from online searches regarding some sort of question that I have. Most of them tend to be months old, some even years. You just make the experience of people like me significantly worse. I wish that services like ceddit stored the content of user-deleted posts.

> Dicks are easy to ignore

Deleted comments are also easy to ignore. Deleting your comments regularly might be construed as a dick move by some people, but as you say, dicks are easy to ignore.

It serves them, which is why they do it. They get to have converaations without them being used against them.

It serves the user; that's why the user is doing it. Whom the hell else should ever be served?

Dumb analogies are dumb. Carefully curating one's online content is in no way similar to "dropping the paper thrash on the street".

It's very similar, you leave thrash around for others to deal with. And it's just not "one's online content", you also degrade the online content of the ones who spent time replying to you and participating in the thread.

I mean it's quite simple. It serves the user at the cost of the community at large.

HN has similar problems because you can edit your post after people have replied to it. This means you can retroactively change history and how prior arguments were framed, which can make other people look like idiots or completely destroy a comment chain.

If you're really concerned about anonymity or your history being used against you, then create throwaways. Otherwise you're not stopping corporations from keeping tabs on you, the moment you hit post that data's already been scraped and stored somewhere.

Does reddit actually delete posts from their systems? Or do they just flag it as deleted in their database? I always assume websites keep deleted data around.

If you really want to be safe, you probably need to utilize multiple online identities. Give the squeaky clean one to your employer if they ask.

I regularly run an extension that first edits, then deletes all my comments.

Yes, I have a similar concern but I just make a new account every now and then.

I used to do this more frequently but they started requiring an email address.

No just click through. No address required.

They also need a captcha if you use a proxy.

I make a lot of HN accounts because of this. Every reply includes more information that can't be deleted but can be used to tie it to my real-life identity. I don't want to have to precede every reply by pointing out it's my views and not my employer's.

The efficacy of such scripts is questionable considering there are sites that archive comments within seconds/minutes of them being posted.

Mind sharing this script?

The following is a good write up of how to do it and then I just set up a cron job on my Linux box to do it every 48 hours:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/aoq9yj/reddit_...

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