Clean Up Your Old Social Media 🧽 🫧
Make the Internet more like Snapchat, Less like Facebook
I’m a big fan of the GDPR regulations the EU passed a few years ago. If you haven't yet, it's a good idea to find out what information companies have been keeping about you. You can use the site Your Digital Rights to help you do it, and it’s fascinating (worrying?) to see what the exports reveal.
Afterward, you can do basically the same thing to have companies delete what they have on you. I deleted my Facebook account the other day, and it was a great feeling—even though I still have Instagram.
But what about accounts like Reddit or Twitter? It would be really annoying to lose all the accounts/spaces you’ve followed over the years. But I also don’t want every single post to live forever.
So I found a script online that automates the deletion of all your Reddit posts and comments, and then I went ahead and turned it into a simple python app in case you don’t want to deal with any code: https://reddit.scottnelson.xyz/, it’s open source as well. Be sure you want to delete your old content before you hit submit.
Doing this made me think: we really should have more controls over our data. GDPR was a good start, but it seems like all social media should have some sort of expiration setting for posts. It’s why Snapchat became so popular: most chatter doesn’t live forever, it’s low-stakes because it’s ephemeral; it’s more natural when you know there isn’t a public record of every word you’re about to say. It’s also why people get ‘writers block’ but not ‘talkers block’.
Unfortunately for Twitter users it seems like any app that cleaned up all posts automatically were broken back in 2023. Frankly these kind of changes are why it’s value has dropped 80% in the last few years.