I did the exact same thing, also with a link that redirects you to a tutorial explaining how to get started with Lemmy. Took about 7 hours but the script actually succesfully edited every single comment I ever made.
I’ve done that with some of my accounts, and my friends did the same. The accounts that linked to Lemmy, Kbin or Mastodon were shadow banned. Manitcor’s solution (another reply to this comment) might be a better option that glides under autobot-radars.
what do you mean illegal? Its my content, the rights i assign to reddit is so they can republish my content, they like to reach out and extend it further but its not enforceable. i can edit my content as i please, its not theirs to own, its theirs to remix and republish without royalty.
people have very broken ideas of how copyright works, its no wonder we hand it all over so easily.
EDIT: Also they can't trigger on edits, its much harder for them to do and would result in a deluge of support issues compared to just undeleting stuff. Further I am the original rights issuer, reddit does not take rights from me I assign rights to them. Its questionable they can legally undo edits.
Be warned: I used the same script to automate changing all my comments to nonsense, but I found a couple of days later that Reddit had changed them all back.
It seems that there's an issue where Reddit rate-limits the comment editing, so many comments don't get edited. There are other versions of the script which add a 5 second delay to avoid getting limited.
Did the same to almost all my accounts -- only left alone one of them just in case spez makes a drastic turnaround someday. Doubtful, but if it does happen, I'll still have all my subscriptions where I left em.
It's your decision, and I hate Reddit and Spez ever since they decided to do the whole API thing, but personally, if I were to close my account, I wouldn't scramble all of my comments and posts. It makes it harder for people who still search for answers to questions on reddit to find what they're looking for. You aren't preserving valuable information with this, you're destroying it.
I scrambled years worth of comments into a statement about the fuckery Reddit has committed and left those edited comments intact while deleting my accounts.
This serves a couple of purposes:
Devalue the platform by destroying information, with the explicit hope that it fucks with Google results and that people will leave if enough people salted the earth on their way out
I deleted all mine, but I don't feel bad as I don't think I posted a single thing of value in about 100 pages worth of comments.
I'd rather leave people pissed off at reddit when they go into a thread and see missing comments. Ideally they will look up the deleted post, then realize it was someone trolling
I debated that for myself, but in the end I still scrambled all my posts and comments. Some were really a loss, I honestly think, but it is a price I'm willing to pay. It is my content, after all, and Reddit has made it very clear that monetizing it by selling it for AI training is part of their business plan. So I went ahead and reluctantly pulled the switch.
I did download everything earlier, so I have a local copy. And most of my OC is also posted elsewhere, so it's not a huge loss, rather an annoying inconvenience. Which I'm fine with, all things considered.