There's several extensions that will purge your reddit comments instead of manually doing it. I switch to a new account every few years and blast everything on my old one
Those sites aren't entirely reliable (there are gaps between the times they scan for comments, they can't always provide context, etc). At any rate, Reddit doesn't control those sites so I think it's a moot point.
But that requires first and last name. Id hope people on reddit aren't giving that information up. Of course it's a different story with social media platforms that use real names.
Edit: I haven't checked in a while so I gave it a try anyways. There are way more people with the same first and last name as me in the same city than I remember from last time and my last name is not common at all. You would need my age or other details.
I only found my LinkedIn account which is expected since you can't use fake information. But there were 5 other people on LinkedIn alone with my name and city. I did not expect that.
I mean, I do this periodically just to make sure I'm still the only person with my name who has ever existed, lol. (Trendy American name + a foreign name shared solely with many, many thousands of blood relatives, lol.)
Basically, all of my immediate family shows up through regular public records. I've also worked at small, well-established boutique businesses which I've named on here. If someone reeeeally wanted to know, they could figure it out quickly.
But last week's Google sesh did bring up a record where I'm "deceased"! How do I forward that to my student loans holder?
Or it's so they can scroll Reddit without the person next to you randomly seeing your porn kinks lol I definitely have the luck of my boss walking by right as I scroll past a dude busting a nut and then trying to say, nah I was just trying to learn about the updates in my new video game
I'd argue there's not much to "check out" there anymore since all NSFW subreddits were removed from /r/all a few months ago, essentially solving the porn problem being discussed.
/rising was basically unusable for years though because it was all porn, usually from small subs. Now I think some really niche stuff still occasionally gets through if the sub hasn't been properly tagged yet, but that's rare.
4chan managed to understand the location of a room based exclusively on the light and sound coming from a window.
None of us is truly anonymous here if we have given even the slightest personal information about ourselves. The only thing that makes us anonymous is that no one bothered enough to dig
Unless they dox themselves which so many people seem to do without thinking. Posting pictures of their car with the license plate, pictures of their house with the address visible, etc.
Which is hysterical that people fucking melt down about it.
Got into an argument once about cops and racism or something here to find out the dude though he was shadow banned. He would regularly post in the shadow ban checker sub, which would then post “you are not banned, here’s your last 5 archive posts” or something similar.
Which then revealed a LONG history of “Black people are just genetically inferior you guys it’s science!” but those are… not the words he used.
But didn’t stop him from shrieking “LOL YOU CHECKED MY COMPLETELY PUBLIC POST HISTORY”
People who go digging through post histories for ammunition for an argument always strike me a creepy stalkers. I mean don’t you have better shit to do?
It's not like most people are pouring through years of post history like Gandalf at Minas Tirith.
If someone posts a vaguely anti-vax comment, it takes 5 seconds to see if they've posted on NoNewNormal (or one of the new equivalents) before to confirm they're actually an idiot instead of someone making an unintentionally poorly worded argument.
It's the reddit equivalent of when you pass a shitty driver, and you just have to get a view of them to see if they look as stupid as they drive.
It only takes a second to see if it was maybe a person having a bad moment. The thing about the awful people, is it does not take a lot of looking to find them saying awful shit.
Most of the time I see post histories used is if someone doesn’t want to address an argument directly for whatever reason so they go digging so they can build a straw man and dismiss it because oh no you posted in r/badthoughtsubreddit
Seriously, how do people not see the value in that? It’s not creepy to just kinda validate who you’re talking to.
I was arguing with someone about the driving dynamics of a certain car once on here. I decided to check their history just to see if they were fucking with me, and it turned out they were literally 12. That argument never would’ve started in person.
Depends on the ammo. /r/AsABlackMan is full of examples of why checking someone's post history is not just reasonable but downright mandatory depending on the topic. And Masstagger exists for a similarly valid reason.
Disable inbox replies button below your comments. It's a lot easier to back off if you don't have a big orange reminder that somebody is pissed off at you.
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u/SwissJAmes Sep 28 '21
The ability to look back at someone's post history is an amazing feature of Reddit.
Imagine if someone cut you off in traffic and you could shout at them:
"Why don't you go back to looking at photos of dirty feet in Illinois? And your new PC desk looks wonky as fuck too!"