Does Deleting Your Reddit Account Delete Your Comments?

Short answer: no, not by default. When you delete your Reddit account, your posts and comments usually stay on the site. They are no longer attached to your username, but the text is still there for anyone to read. If your goal is to make the content disappear, deleting the account alone does not do it.

Here is what really happens, and what to do if you want the comments gone too.

What deleting your account actually does

Deleting your account mostly affects the account, not the content you wrote with it.

• Your username stops working and is removed from your profile.
• Your posts and comments stay in their threads.
• On each one, the author changes from your username to [deleted].

So the link between you and the content is cut, but the content itself remains. A comment you wrote three years ago is still sitting in that thread, word for word. It just no longer says who wrote it.

Orphaned, not erased

This trips a lot of people up. They delete the account expecting a clean slate, then later find their old comments still up, now labelled as posted by a deleted user.

The text is what most people actually want gone, and that is the part that stays. The username being hidden helps a little, but anyone reading the thread can still see exactly what was said.

How to actually remove your comments

If you want the content gone, you have to deal with the posts and comments before you delete the account, while you can still edit them.

1. Go through your post and comment history while logged in.
2. Edit or delete each item you want removed. Some people first edit the text to something blank, then delete, so even a captured copy is less useful.
3. Only after that, delete the account itself.

This is tedious if you have years of history. There are third-party tools that try to bulk-delete comments, but Reddit has limited what they can do, and they come and go. Doing it by hand is slow but reliable.

Even deleting comments is not a guarantee

Removing a comment takes it off the thread, but it does not always erase every copy. A lot of Reddit content gets captured by third parties shortly after it is posted, before anyone deletes anything. If a copy was made in that window, the original text can still be looked up later.

This is the same reason [deleted] and [removed] comments can often still be read. We go into it in more detail in can you see deleted Reddit comments.

Reddit itself also keeps some data for a period after deletion, for legal and safety reasons, even if other users can no longer see it.

What this means in practice

• Deleting your account hides your username, not your words.
• To remove the content, edit or delete the posts and comments first, then delete the account.
• Even then, copies captured before deletion may survive, so treat anything you posted as potentially permanent.

If you want to see what is still out there under a username, including content that was later deleted or removed when a copy was captured, you can look it up. And if you are trying to get your own content taken down here, see the removal and opt-out page.

The bottom line

Deleting your Reddit account does not delete your comments. It detaches them from your name and leaves the text in place. If erasing the content is the goal, clean up the posts and comments first, then close the account, and keep in mind that anything captured early may still be readable afterward.