
Show HN: SocialAmnesia-An open source tool that auto-erases old Reddits/tweets - NickGott
https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-Amnesia
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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/v1.0.0)

What is this?

I’m excited to release 1.0.0 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've detailed here: [https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-
Amnesia#limitatio...](https://github.com/Nick-Gottschlich/Social-
Amnesia#limitations)). 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.

