How to see deleted Reddit comments in 2026: what still works

You can't see a deleted Reddit comment on Reddit, and no API that reads live Reddit can bring one back, ChatterAPI included. When an author deletes a comment, the text is gone. Since September 2025, a comment that moderators remove also disappears from the author's public profile. The only copies left are in archives like Arctic Shift that saved the comment before it went.

That second change is why most "see deleted Reddit comments" advice online is out of date. Reveddit, unddit and removeddit were built for a Reddit that kept removed comments on user profiles. We checked every tool below on October 17, 2026, and ran our own test on a real thread to see what each route can still recover.

Deleted vs removed: two different things

Reddit hides a comment in one of two ways, and each leaves a different trace.

Reddit announced the profile change in r/modnews on September 9, 2025. Before it, a removed comment "continues to appear on the user profile until it's reported and additionally removed by Reddit." After it, content "Removed by mods" is "Fully removed from Reddit, visible only to the original poster and your mod team."

That sentence is what broke the undelete tools. They worked by reading a user's profile, where the comment still showed, and comparing it with the thread, where it showed [removed]. Once mods could pull the comment from the profile as well, the tools had nothing left to compare.

Which deleted Reddit comment tools still work (checked October 17, 2026)

Reveddit

Reveddit still loads, but the thread link we tried redirected to its notice about the Reddit change. The creator wrote that the change "broke the main Reveddit.com website's ability to track your removed content", and spelled out why: "before, if a mod removed your comment, it still existed on your profile. Now, a mod can delete it from their subreddit and your profile, effectively erasing it from public view entirely."

The Reveddit Real-Time extension still works because it runs in your own logged-in browser, and you can see your own removed content there. It alerts you when your posts or comments get removed. It can't show you anyone else's.

Unddit, Removeddit and Camas

All three are gone. Unddit's domain no longer resolves. Removeddit's domain now serves a page titled "Best Ontario Online Casinos", so don't paste thread links into it. The Camas Reddit search page on GitHub Pages returns a 404. A guide that still recommends any of them was written before 2025.

PullPush

After Pushshift closed, many people moved to PullPush's undelete viewer. On October 17 the site showed us a Cloudflare security check, and its API answered a scripted request with HTTP 429 and this message: "This website does not provide free scraping resources for agents." The Reddit Archive search page, a third-party front end built on it, says in its own changelog that PullPush "only has data up to 20th May 2025." Our PullPush page covers the longer history.

Arctic Shift

Arctic Shift is the one archive anyone can still query. It ingests new posts and comments within seconds, and that speed is the only reason it holds copies of things deleted or removed later. Its week was rough: an issue filed October 15 reported no new data, and the maintainer replied "there are currently some disruptions, because of change reddit has made", then "Should now be mostly caught up" the next morning.

This is what people use it for. A moderator in r/modnews wrote on October 16: "it's the deleted posts where we most often find inconsistencies or bot evidence, and those i can only access with arctic shift or rosint." It misses things too. On October 17 a user in r/askmath guessed that someone "deleted it too fast for Arctic Shift to back up its link."

Rosint, named in that first quote, advertises viewing deleted posts and private profiles. We didn't test it and don't know where its data comes from.

The Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive used to be a fallback for whole threads. In August 2025 Reddit restricted its access to post, comment and profile pages. On October 17 we asked the Wayback availability API for the AskHistorians thread below and for a 2026 r/redditdev post. Neither had any snapshots, and the CDX search service showed "Temporarily Offline."

What we tested on October 17, 2026

We wanted to test, on a real thread, whether a live API can show mod-removed comments in any form, and whether an archive had kept them.

We used the r/AskHistorians post 1x3l4dh, posted October 11, 2026. AskHistorians removes answers that don't meet its sourcing rules, so removed comments are easy to find there. Reddit counts 115 comments on the post. Our thread call returned 27, and 3 of those were top-level comments shown as [removed] with the author [deleted].

The first step was the thread itself. GET /v1/reddit/threads/1x3l4dh returned the three removed comments with ids pfd53ip, pfctwio and pfdaawh, body [removed] and author [deleted]. The thread alone doesn't tell you who wrote them.

Next we checked the archive, looking up the three ids in Arctic Shift's ID lookup. It had the original text and author for two of them, captured 12 and 17 seconds after posting. The third was already [removed] when Arctic Shift fetched it 26 seconds after posting, which looks like an instant AutoModerator removal.

Last, we checked the authors' public histories. For the two authors Arctic Shift identified, we called GET /v1/reddit/users/{name}/comments. Each call returned that user's 25 most recent public comments. One page ran from September 30 to October 17 and the other from October 5 to October 16, so both covered October 12, the day the comments were posted. Neither removed comment appeared in either history: 0 of 2.

So a mod-removed comment is now invisible to any logged-out reader, an API included, both in the thread and on the author's profile. Only the archive had the text. We aren't naming the two authors or quoting their removed comments here, because the subreddit decided they shouldn't be public.

There are two caveats. Two comments is a small sample, though the result matches what Reddit's announcement and Reveddit's notice both describe. Also, "the 25 most recent comments" is a single page of history. A removed comment from someone who comments a lot could fall outside that window, and that's why we checked the dates on both pages first.

What a live API shows instead

This is the thread call from step 1. It cost 3 credits on a live key:

curl "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1/reddit/threads/1x3l4dh" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHATTERAPI_KEY"

The response below was captured October 17, 2026 and trimmed to the post, one visible comment and one removed comment:

{
  "data": {
    "post": {
      "id": "1x3l4dh",
      "subreddit": "AskHistorians",
      "score": 850,
      "numComments": 115,
      "createdAt": "2026-10-11T22:15:27.000Z"
    },
    "comments": [
      {
        "id": "pfd646c",
        "parentId": null,
        "author": "indyobserver",
        "body": "This is a bit of a complicated question, but I'll simplify it by focusing on what was the single biggest factor in this change: World War II. …",
        "score": 517,
        "createdAt": "2026-10-12T01:52:49.000Z"
      },
      {
        "id": "pfd53ip",
        "parentId": null,
        "author": "[deleted]",
        "body": "[removed]",
        "score": 3,
        "subreddit": "AskHistorians",
        "createdAt": "2026-10-12T01:47:09.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "page": { "nextCursor": null, "hasMore": false },
  "credits": { "charged": 3, "remaining": 696 },
  "requestId": "req_01M54YX43TR1CZZ4SSXD",
  "cached": false
}

A live API can't give you the text of a deleted comment, but it can answer the questions around it:

• Whether the comment was removed or deleted: [removed] means a moderator, AutoModerator or Reddit took it down, and [deleted] in the body means the author did.
• Whether the account still exists: GET /v1/reddit/users/{name}/status returns active, suspended or a not-visible state for 2 credits, and the free Reddit account checker does the same in a browser. Our shadowban check guide explains why a deleted, a banned and a shadowbanned account can look the same from outside.
• What else the person said that's still up: the comment history and post history tools list what's still public.

Reddit's rules point the same way. The Data API Wiki (checked October 17, 2026) says "You must remove any user content in your possession that has been deleted from Reddit", and recommends deleting stored user data within 48 hours. Any service that follows Reddit's terms is built so it won't show you deleted comments.

The case against undelete tools

The strongest argument against this whole category isn't technical. Under an Arctic Shift issue in September 2026, a user asked how to remove their history "because people are looking up comments section you made in the past to doxx." They had mass-deleted their comments and even edited them to gibberish, and the archive still showed the originals. Reddit also gave privacy as one of its reasons for restricting the Wayback Machine.

Both points are fair. Deleting a comment is often the only privacy control a person has, and an archive that ignores deletion takes that control away. The other side is just as real. The r/modnews moderator above uses deleted posts to catch bots and inconsistent stories, and sometimes a removed comment is the only evidence of what a thread was about.

Arctic Shift handles this with a removal request form, which its maintainer linked in that issue. If you're looking up deleted comments, keep it to what you need: your own removed content, moderation of your own community, or research that has passed an ethics review. Our Arctic Shift page covers its API and dumps, and Pushshift vs PullPush vs Arctic Shift compares the three archives in depth.

How to see removed and deleted comments, by situation

Check a thread or an account from code

If you're building a moderation tool or an agent that needs to know what state a Reddit thread or account is in, ChatterAPI returns it as JSON, and you don't need a Reddit developer account. It's independent and not affiliated with Reddit. Sign up with Google for 100 free credits with no card. That covers 33 thread checks or 50 account status checks. Plans start at $19 a month for 25,000 credits. We can't give you the deleted text itself. For that, go to Arctic Shift.