Reddit has taken the world by storm. It allows the posting and discussion of various topics and many YouTubers and influencers have their own subreddits now where they interact with their fans. There are also more serious, embarrassing, and complex subreddits and right-out offensive ones.
Most people don’t write offensive posts, and you are likely included in that group that don’t but all of us occasionally post something personal or embarrassing that we may not want others to see or to have on the internet forever.
While reddit have made it clear that once you delete a post it is forever lost to other users, Reddit themselves will be keeping details such as your IP address and the post on their servers forever. While this really isn’t an issue for most users, we will discuss how to potentially manage previous posts considering this at the end of the article – just in case you posted something that needs to literally disappear off the face of the earth. We won’t even try to guess what that might be.
There might be more of a security reason for some users deleting and overwriting all of their comments and posts. Doxing bots and individuals trying to dox others are becoming more prevalent. Doxing is the act where someone tries to reveal or unearth personal information such as a user’s real identity. This is of course incredibly uncomfortable even if you haven’t posted anything wrong – Reddit is an anonymous platform at its core and for that reason you may wish to start over if you are concerned you have revealed too much about yourself in your posts.
Table of Contents
Deleting Posts on a Web Browser
There are currently two versions of the Reddit website in operation. The new version and the old one. You can delete your posts on either. We will discuss how step by step below starting with the new version.
New Reddit
- Open the Reddit site and log in
- In the top right-side corner, you will see your avatar, click the down-arrow next to it
- Select My Profile
- A horizontal menu will become visible under the search bar click Posts
- A list of your posts will appear – navigate to the post you want to delete
- Click the ellipsis icon (…) and select delete post.
- Confirm that you want to delete the post
Old Reddit
If you are still using the old website, navigate there and log in, then:
- Select your profile picture/ username
- Selected Submitted in the tabs that appear
- You will be navigated to all your old posts
- Find the post you want to delete and click the delete link under the post
Deleting Posts on a Smartphone or Tablet
Again, this is very easy to do, and just required a few steps.
- In the reddit app tap on your avatar in the left-hand side of your screen.
- Select My Profile in the menu that appears
- Your posts will appear – navigate to the post you want to delete
- Click the ellipsis … and select delete
Overwriting Comments and Posts
Some people’s privacy concerns are not relieved simply by removing their posts from the internet alone is not enough. Who knows – the reddit servers might get hacked one day and all that information you’ve gone through the effort of deleting will be in the hands of evil cyber-attackers.
To alleviate their concerns these Redditors have opted to overwrite all of their potentially private comments or posts with something insignificant such as “Squirrels like nuts” in the belief that this will overwrite the information stored on Reddit’s servers.
You can follow this trend if you are very concerned, but for most situations, it will likely suffice to just delete the post or comment in question using the methods detailed above.
