Introducing Redact for YouTube: Mass delete your comments, likes, video uploads, and more!

For a lot of people, YouTube is one of the oldest accounts they have and still use. You made it back in the mid-2000s so you could post a home video, it came along with a Gmail address, and it's been quietly writing down your activity ever since. Every video watched, every search typed, every like tapped, every comment left at two in the morning...it's all there.

YouTube (Google) never asked your permission to archive all of this activity, they took it upon themselves to start your digital diary. Making it even more annoying, YouTube gives you zero realistic options in dealing with it. Sure, you can delete it all one by one, but it would take days doing it by hand. In all fairness, Google will wipe your watch and search history for you, and that's about where the bulk options stop. Comments, likes, playlists and subscriptions all come off one at a time, by hand, forever.

Redact now handles YouTube. It's the same local-first app you'd already point at Twitter, Reddit or Discord, and it covers eight kinds of YouTube content in one pass.

What Redact clears from YouTube

Pick as many as you want in a single run.

• Watch history. Everything you've played, which is also the thing steering your recommendations.
• Search history. Every phrase you've typed into the search bar, which is often more revealing than what you actually watched.
• Comments. Every comment you've left anywhere on YouTube, under your name, still attached to whatever video it was about.
• Liked videos. A running list of everything you've ever tapped like on. On plenty of accounts it's public.
• Watch Later. The queue that quietly turned into a few hundred videos you're never going to get to. Redact empties it and leaves the queue itself in place.
• Playlists. The lists themselves, not the videos inside them. One you built gets deleted, one you saved from someone else gets dropped from your library.
• Subscriptions. Channels you're subscribed to, unsubscribed in bulk.
• Uploads. Videos you posted yourself, deleted permanently.

Each one has its own page with the full detail on how its filters behave.

The stuff YouTube makes hard to delete

Some of this you can do by hand if you've got a spare evening or two. The rest, you can't really do much about unless you're prepared to spend countless hours clicking repetitively on the same buttons, it's exhausting and mind-numbing.

• Comments are the clearest example of their ridiculous deletion options. No delete-all, no list view worth the name, just an activity feed where every comment takes a menu, a Delete and a confirm. Past a hundred, that's days of clicking, which is why the usual advice online is to nuke the whole Google account and hope your comments go with it.
• Subscriptions are the other one. YouTube's subscription manager unsubscribes one channel at a time, with a confirmation on each. A list built up over ten years takes hundreds of clicks to undo. Redact works through the list for you.
• Watch and search history are the one thing Google already handles. My Activity clears a date range, and Redact goes through that same page. The difference is it happens in the same run as everything else. Watch history can also be filtered by video title. A search entry has no video behind it, so it goes by date alone.

Take a look before anything gets deleted

• Preview runs your filters and shows you what matched without touching anything. It's worth doing every time, and it's the honest way to find out that a keyword was broader than you thought.
• Review goes item by item so you can approve or skip each one, which suits comments better than it suits ten thousand history entries.
• Deletion just runs it. Make sure your filters are set correctly, there's no getting your content back once you run the deletion mode.
• Schedule re-runs the whole thing on a recurring basis, so new comments and history get cleared as they accumulate instead of piling up for another decade. Scheduling is a Premium feature.

For ultimate privacy: it runs on your machine, not ours

When you connect YouTube, Redact opens a browser window on your computer and you sign in to Google there. That login goes to Google. It never passes through a Redact server, and we never see your password.

Your history, comments and search terms are read and deleted on your machine. There's no copy of your account sitting on our infrastructure, because there's no reason for one to exist.

Google rate-limits accounts that behave like a script, so Redact paces itself. A big cleanup takes a while. Leave it running.

What's free to use and what's not

Redact is free to download on Windows, macOS and Linux, and your last 30 days of YouTube comments, watch history and search history are free to clear. Liked videos and Watch Later get a free 30-day window too, with one caveat worth knowing. YouTube doesn't record when you liked or saved something, so Redact matches those two against the video's upload date instead. Saving a five-year-old clip last week puts it at the old end of the range, not the recent one.

Going back further than 30 days needs a Premium Redact account. So do three things at any age, because a date range can't scope them the way it scopes the rest.

• Playlists and subscriptions don't carry a date at all. A playlist isn't a moment in time and neither is a subscription, so there's no last 30 days of either to hand out.
• Uploads are picked by hand from a list rather than swept by date, and hand-picking is the premium capability.

Where to go next

• The YouTube hub pulls it all together, and every content type above links through to its own page with the filters explained in full.
• Why deleting old posts is so important covers the reasoning, if you're weighing whether it's worth doing at all.
• What to delete before a background check is the practical version, if you've got a specific reason and a deadline.