Reddit is one of the most popular websites on the internet, consistently ranking in the top 10 most visited sites every month. With 91.2 million active users every single day, the website sees a monumental number of threads and posts across its millions of subreddits. While Reddit introduced comment searching in 2022, finding a specific post or comment can quickly become a challenge, especially if it’s deleted for some reason.
There are a few options if you want to access deleted Reddit posts, despite numerous services ending operations after Reddit placed their API behind a paywall. One of them is using the Wayback Machine — a service aimed at capturing and storing digital culture by scraping billions of web pages, including Reddit. This internet archive is so comprehensive that it might even have a copy of your old MySpace page.
In order to view a Reddit post that’s been deleted, simply visit the Wayback Machine and enter the URL of the Reddit thread you want to access. When you search a given URL, the Wayback Machine will show previous snapshots it may have taken of the page. As there can be multiple snapshots of some pages, viewing them lets you track a thread at different times throughout its life and see any posts that may have been deleted or altered.
Reveddit can show deleted comments
While the Wayback Machine is a fantastic tool, it’s far from perfect. If the service hasn’t scraped a website — or if a post has been deleted before being archived– the website won’t be able to show it. In this case, an alternative like Reveddit can be a great choice. When you visit Reveddit, you’ll see a very basic layout with a simple text entry field. From here, you have a few options to search for a deleted Reddit post, thread, or comment. You may enter the specific user or subreddit name in the text field to load deleted threads and posts, or use Reveddit on Reddit itself.
If you find yourself in a thread with a deleted post that you’d like to read, simply replace reddit with reveddit in the URL. Doing this will forward you to the Reveddit website and show any deleted posts. However, one limitation with Reveddit is that it can only show comments removed by the subreddit’s moderator and not the ones deleted by users. That said, using the Wayback Machine and Reveddit combined should help you recover a good number of deleted posts.
