Mass Edit Your Reddit Posts and Comments to Beat the Archive Bots

Deleting only cleans Reddit's own copy. Third-party archive bots that scraped your comment earlier keep their version, and a delete does nothing to it. Overwriting changes the live text those bots see on their next pass, so your original words stop being the current record. As Redact's Edit switch puts it, many archival bots record your comments, but not your edits.

No. The Edit action is free on every plan, at any age, and there's no item cap. Writing your own custom replacement message, and permanently deleting rather than anonymizing, are the paid extras.

Editing is free on every plan, so any account can overwrite rather than delete. Out of the box the replacement is a privacy notice followed by a random harmless phrase. The notice reads: "The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy." A paid plan lets you replace the random phrase with any message you like, from a short note to a full statement. Either way, the Redact notice is always included and can't be removed, because many subreddits use that line to auto-remove edited content.

Reddit flags an edited comment the same way it always has, and the body shows your placeholder text. What no one can see is what used to be there. The whole point is that the current, visible, and scrapeable version is the placeholder.

It's a popular one-two. The overwrite poisons what future scrapes can collect, and a follow-up deletion clears the placeholder off Reddit as well. Each is its own run: set the action to Edit for the first pass, then to Delete for the second.

Yes. On paid plans the "Skip comments already edited by Redact" option is on by default, so repeat runs leave your existing placeholders alone instead of rewriting them again.