
Show HN: SocialAmnesia – Open-source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets - NickGott
https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia
======
throwawaymath
Unfortunately it's not actually possible to delete reddit comments from being
publicly searchable. There are several independent projects which continuously
retrieve and store every single comment. For example, PushShift[1] constantly
crawls reddit for all new comments and posts. Their entire corpus of
historical data is freely available for download. There is even a free service
to search through any user's entire comment and submission history[2]. This
includes deleted comments and deleted users.

_____________

1\. [https://pushshift.io/](https://pushshift.io/)

2\. [http://redditsearch.io/](http://redditsearch.io/)

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oftenwrong
That only matters as long as those services are alive and people bother to
keep the data.

~~~
StellarTabi
The pushshift data sets are downloadable.

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css
I have previously used Shame Eraser [0] for this, which uses your Twitter
Archive [1] to get all of the status IDs so you don't run into rate limiting
problems. I was able to delete 87k tweets in a few hours a couple years ago
with it. Is this software just as fast?

[0]: [https://github.com/benjaminjackson/shame-
eraser](https://github.com/benjaminjackson/shame-eraser)

[1]: [https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-
dow...](https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-
your-twitter-archive)

~~~
NickGott
Wow, I didn't even think about using a twitter archive to delete everything.
This will help me get around the 3.2k API limit problem I was experiencing.
I'll work on integrating this.

~~~
agentdrtran
would this work for likes as wlel ?

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NickGott
I will have to check and see if the twitter archive also stores likes/retweets

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kkarakk
Reddit should ban these kinda tools, a lot of useful threads become
unreadable. Maybe some tool to dissociate your identity from the content made
by reddit itself would be better.

Usage of this kinda tool always smacks of "screw you guys i'm going home" to
me, i invariably have to resort to some sort of undelete/wayback service
focused on reddit to see what the thread conversation was about esp when it
was about a technical topic/ info only that niche community care about(a
recent one i had was about rha headphones, half the thread was full of these
"i deleted my reddit presence coz reasons etc etc" comments

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StellarTabi
Fair warning, I use tools like masstagger, pushshift, and redusa to analyze
users when deciding if a ban is appropriate. It's not difficult for anyone to
still read over 99% of your deleted comments.

~~~
scotu
interesting, is the writer of a comment entitled of the copyright on them?
could you dmca this services?

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rolleiflex
I do agree with the premise to the point that I built a Reddit-like thing that
has this natively at 6-month mark. (Link in profile)

This is probably where all social platforms will eventually end up, whether
they like or not.

~~~
baroffoos
Its just security theater though. Every popular website has scripts saving
every comment that gets posted as well as users manually mirroring content to
archive websites. The real solution is anonymity. You may regret saying
something stupid years ago but who cares if no one can link it to your present
self.

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pardonmyfrench
How does this tool play with large data gatherers like the Library of Congress
that regularly archive tweets? Just asking for visibility.

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shambolicfroli
What are the misuse cases, and what does the software try to do about them?

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TACIXAT
Interestingly, there is no way to delete hackernews comments or accounts.

~~~
Can_Not
Actually, I find this incredibly sad. Users should, at the minimum, have the
right to delete their comments or detach their username from them.

~~~
HNLurker2
Just mail at hn@ycombinator.com

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NickGott
Direct link to release with downloadables: [https://github.com/Nick-
Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia/releases/...](https://github.com/Nick-
Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia/releases/tag/v1.2.0)

What's new?

\- New feature can edit reddit items with random gibberish a random amount of
times to throw off archival services.

\- New feature will edit your reddit items but not delete them to throw off
archival services.

What is this?

I’m excited to release 1.2.0 of my side project, Social Amnesia! This
completely free and open source software allows you to wipe out old reddit and
twitter posts, comments, tweets, and favorites, automatically and on a
schedule. It also allows you to configure certain items to be saved based on
configuration options like number of upvotes, favorites, or retweets, whether
an item has been gilded, how old an item is, or by specifically whitelisting
items you would like to have saved.

Who is this for?

I assume most of you are wary of what you post on reddit, twitter, facebook
(if you even have one), etc. However, I can also imagine many of your friends
and family are not. At the end of the day, the safest you can possibly be is
to not use any social media. But I think the war on drugs and abstinence-based
sex-ed proves everything we need to know about telling people to "just say
no". What I believe we should be doing is working towards solutions that help
reduce the damage that destructive activities can cause. This is why I've
built Social Amnesia, which lets you keep your social media history clean with
just a few button clicks, and set it up to automatically clean proactively
(instead of reactively, after something bad happens to you).

Most of the tools out that allow you to manage reddit and twitter history are
either very user unfriendly (require you to operate command lines and work
with scary configuration text files) or cost money. I wanted to develop one
that had a convenient user interface and was built to be completely open
source so it could be checked to be sure it had no nefarious purposes. I
believe the free aspect also helps get people to actually try and use it.

Why would you need this?

If you've been following the news recently you've probably seen cases of
celebrities losing out on big career opportunities because of tweets or other
internet posts from their past coming back to haunt them. Kevin Hart and The
Oscars and James Gunn and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 are two of the more
high profile examples of this recently. Make no mistake, this could happen to
anyone, not just high profile individuals. If you are going to tweet, cleaning
up your old tweets is one of the best ways to keep a nightmare like this from
ruining a potential job opportunity or relationship. Since twitter is mainly
focused on current events, and as far as I can tell it's rare for people to
look far back in someone's twitter history, this shouldn't effect your day to
day interaction with twitter.

On the reddit side of things, many people maintain pseudonymous accounts to
post in places like /r/sex, /r/politics or /r/trees. The more reddit history
you have, the higher chance you have of being doxxed by someone who might comb
through your posts to try and scrape together details to de-cloak you and
reveal your real identity. Keeping your reddit history clean is a good
deterrent from being doxxed.

Concerns

I've received concerns about this software when I've posted it before. I'll
try my best to detail some of my arguments here, but please leave a comment if
you have anything to share and I'll do my best to respond to you. One of the
main concerns I've heard is from people who've gone back to an old reddit post
and there have been deleted comments that might have been useful for them
(semi-relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/979/](https://xkcd.com/979/)). I hear
you, and to try and combat this I've added some features to this software. The
first is a whitelist window, which as far as I know is the only of it's kind
in free management software for reddit. Opening this window shows you all of
your comments or posts and let's you pick ones to save from deletion.
Additionally, when you do go to delete anything, the software will show you
every item that will be deleted and ask you to confirm your decision. This
software doesn't do anything that isn't possible for a user to do by simply
going back through their comments and deleting them.

I realize this isn't a complete solution, so I'd recommend using this software
only if you use your reddit or twitter accounts for more current events or
sensitive topics. If you provide helpful advice online and want to make sure
it's preserved, be careful using this.

The second concern I've heard is related to backups, archives and having a
false sense of privacy around using this software. Obviously I can't delete
anything from reddit or twitter's internal servers, and I can't remove
something if it's archived somewhere else. And I'm also limited by their APIs
(which I detail on the login page of the application). However I've done some
research, and backups of reddit and twitter are sparse, incomplete, and often
hard to find and access. For a while the library of congress was archiving
every tweet out there, but they gave up when that became too difficult a task
due to the sheer size of twitter. Unless someone is actively archiving your
posts, there is a good chance that deleting a tweet or reddit item will
actually remove them from the internet.

~~~
techntoke
Cool idea, but no Linux support and only Twitter and Reddit? Does it work by
simulating user activity? I'd be worried about anything using the API that
would trigger some internal alert/archival due to thinking it is a bot trying
to remove evidence. I think the biggest thing to keep people safe is not to
post under their real identity, and try to use a service (VPN, proxy, etc)
that doesn't trace back to you. Web browsers are pretty guilty here in terms
of what they permit to be tracked by default using JS that can almost
immediately identify a user based on browser version/OS/etc.

~~~
NickGott
It's built in Python, it's pretty simple for a Linux user to run it (I have
instructions on the readme that explain how to do so from the command line). I
just haven't built an executable for Linux because of how many different Linux
OS there are out there in use.

And yeah, only Twitter and Reddit right now, the next plans are to get
Instagram working with this.

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techntoke
Don't forget the evil Facebook too, please.

~~~
NickGott
That one is a stretch goal, I'd love to do it but they are much less...
friendly to this kind of thing than reddit or twitter is.

