I can honestly say that I wouldn’t be working at Android Police if it wasn’t for Reddit. I started more than a decade ago making lists on r/androidgaming, because even back then the Play Store was atrocious for discovery. After messing around with my own sites and a startup, I moved on to writing at AP, still to this day making lists ofall the best gamesyou can find.

While I fondly remember Reddit’s better days, it’s safe to sayits hate-filled front pagedoesn’t hit the mark of yesteryear. I’ve built up a stable of accounts by this point, yet I rarely log into the site unless I’m checking in on a few hobby subreddits that aren’t ruined yet. Ever since Reddit raised its API fees beyond the bounds of the very people who built the content of the site (for free, I might add), things haven’t gotten much better, and we’ve learned rather recently that Reddit is selling our content for $60 million so Google can feed its AI. Reddit plans to go public, having announced its IPO is official, revealing it paid the CEO $193M in 2023, the very year the site saw major protests from the moderators after the API price hike. Disgusted yet?

A blue background with the Reddit logo, which features a white alien head. However, in this version, the alien’s face is shown with a sad expression, with its eyes semi-closed and mouth turned down.

Google will use Reddit’s hate-filled content to train its AI

Deal for $60 million per year was struck ahead of Reddit’s rumored IPO

Let’s take back control

By taking back our content

This is the point I say we take our content back, which is why I’ve not only deleted all of my accounts, I’ve used specialized tools to delete all of my posts; over a decade of knowledge Google and Reddit can no longer profit from.

How to delete your Reddit account

Time to blow up that burner account

The best part is that everyone can join in the fun. So, if you are also pretty peeved that your years of free knowledge will be used by greedy corporations for profit, here are the tools I recommend for not only deleting your account, but every single comment you’ve ever made. And the beauty is, you’re able to even use these tools to mess with Google’s plans to scrape the content for its AI, because you can also edit all of your comments in bulk, leaving behind nonsense that AI won’t be able to make heads or tails of. A double whammy for those of you who would like to also stick it to Google.

A pile of $100 bills

The best tools for the job are actually pretty easy to use

These are my two go-tos that should cover most people’s needs

First up isPower Delete Suite, available for free on GitHub. It’s a robust tool that can delete all your comments, and even replace them with new text. You can even drill down to keep certain comments and bulk delete others. It’s basically a bookmarklet, and the instructions to install are available on GitHub and easy to follow. This is the tool I recommend for all the power users out there. If you’re looking for something a little more simple,Shreddit is available for $5 a monthand makes things pretty easy; where you can cancel after deleting everything or remain subbed if you wish to retain its power long-term to continually use Reddit while deleting content after set periods of time. It is handy if you wish to keep your account and interact without leaving your knowledge lying around for scummy companies to profit from your work.

Sure, ultimately, Reddit has full control of its servers, and it may have backups of backups of backups, retaining all of our data despite it looking as if it has been deleted. So, there is a chance that such a protest could be for naught. Still, I took that gamble because, ultimately, why not? Just about all of my Google Search queries tend to have the word Reddit appended to the end, thanks to Google losing the SEO wars where results are filled with endless blogspam. But guess what? If you delete your Reddit comments, Google won’t be able to serve up your knowledge in Search, which is a fine enough reason for me to withhold the information I left in my wake over the last decade.

Power Delete suite

I’m sick of greedy companies profiting off of my knowledge

And I don’t just mean AI stealing my AP content

At the end of the day, if Reddit and Google wish to use our hard work to profit so immensely as so many of us struggle, in my opinion, they are going to have to start paying us directly. Even Reddit’s IPO filing admitted more protests could be very damaging to the company before it realizes its goal. I say let’s let them have it by taking our content back and, thus, control.