Deleted Reddit comments
See deleted Reddit comments from archived threads
Paste a comment's permalink or the thread it was in. PeekVault lists every Internet Archive capture of that page, old Reddit and new, and opens the newest one inline so you can read what the comment said before it became [deleted] or [removed]. No login, nothing scraped.
Updated September 2026
Which comments can come back
A comment the author deleted ([deleted], username blanked)
Readable only in a capture taken before the deletion. Threads that were linked from a news story, a wiki or another thread have those captures; a quiet thread in a small subreddit usually has none.
A comment a moderator or AutoModerator removed ([removed], username still shown)
The most recoverable kind. Removals follow reports, reports follow attention, and attention gets the page crawled before the moderator gets to it.
Comments from a deleted or suspended account
The live thread shows [deleted] on every one of them, but a capture from while the account existed still carries the text and the username. Captures of the account's own profile page list its comments too.
Replies hidden behind 'load more comments' or collapsed for low score
Old Reddit captures carry the first few hundred comments as plain HTML. Anything Reddit only loaded when someone clicked was never in the page the crawler saved.
Comments in private or quarantined subreddits, or in threads nobody ever linked to
The crawler only saves public pages it was pointed at. Zero captures means no public archive anywhere holds that text.
Comment permalink or thread link: which one to paste
A comment has two addresses that matter here. The first is its permalink, the link you get from Share and Copy link, which opens the comment on its own page with its replies underneath. The Internet Archive captures a permalink when something pointed at it directly: a news story quoting the comment, a wiki footnote, another thread. Reddit has written that link three different ways over the years (with the thread's title slug, with the word comment, or with a dash), and a capture can sit under any of them, so PeekVault checks all three at once and lists whatever it finds.
The second address is the thread the comment was posted in. Threads are captured far more often than individual comments, so when the permalink comes back empty PeekVault shows the thread captures instead. The comment is somewhere on that page; use your browser's find (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) with the username or a phrase you remember, and step back through the dates until the placeholder turns into text.
Why comments disappear, and what the label tells you
Reddit keeps the slot and fills it with a label, and the label says who acted. [deleted] with the username also blanked is the author. [removed] with the username still visible is a moderator, an AutoModerator rule or a spam filter; on the redesign it reads "Comment removed by moderator". [ Removed by Reddit ] is the company itself, usually after a legal or policy complaint. [unavailable] means the account was suspended. And a comment that is merely folded up with a "show" link is not gone at all: it was collapsed for a low score or by the subreddit's crowd control setting, and it opens with one click.
Author deletions are the hard case, because they are often quiet: nobody linked the thread, so nobody crawled it. The exception is bulk deletion. When people wipe their history with a script, which happened at scale during the 2023 API protests, they delete comments in threads that were popular years earlier and were captured many times back then. Those captures are frequently the only remaining copy of a comment that thousands of people once upvoted.
Finding the comment inside a thread capture
A capture is the whole page as it stood at one moment, sorted the way the crawler received it, which is almost always Reddit's default "best" order. Open the newest capture first. If the comment already shows the placeholder there, use the year chips and the capture list to move earlier; the change from placeholder to text usually happens between two captures a few weeks apart, and the newer of the two is the one to read. Old Reddit captures are the easiest to work with, because every comment is in the HTML and the browser's find reaches all of them.
When the account that wrote the comment has since been deleted, the username is gone from later captures as well, so find by content instead: a phrase quoted in one of the replies is the fastest handle. Replies are rarely deleted together with the parent, and a reply that starts with a quote of the parent is common.
The tools that used to do this, and what still works
Unddit, Removeddit, Ceddit, Resavr and the redditsearch.io front end all read from Pushshift, a project that ingested every public comment through Reddit's API. When Reddit changed its API terms in 2023, Pushshift lost that access, its public endpoints closed, and every site built on it went dark. Some of the domains are still up, which is why people keep finding them, but they show nothing.
Two sources remain. Reveddit still shows comments removed by moderators in recent months, because it can compare what Reddit serves to the public with what it serves to the author; it cannot show author deletions. And the Internet Archive holds captures of every Reddit thread that was ever linked to, taken at the time, with whatever comments were on the page. PeekVault is a reader over those captures and nothing more: it does not scrape Reddit, does not keep a copy, and does not need Reddit's permission to keep working.
What no capture will give you
A comment posted after the thread's last capture. A comment deleted within minutes, before any crawler arrived. Replies that sat behind "load more comments" when the page was saved. Anything in a private or quarantined subreddit. And an edit history: a capture shows the comment as it read on that date, which is useful when you want the text from before an edit, but it is one version, not a diff.
For a user's whole history or a subreddit's front page by date, the Reddit archive handles u/username and r/subreddit lookups. To read one deleted post inline, the Reddit viewer is the shorter route. For the three methods side by side, read how to see deleted Reddit posts without an account.
FAQ
Deleted comment questions
Can I see a deleted Reddit comment without an account?
Yes, when a capture exists. Paste the comment's permalink and PeekVault looks for captures of that permalink under every address format Reddit has used, plus the old.reddit.com version. If the permalink itself was never captured, PeekVault falls back to captures of the whole thread, where the comment is still on the page. Nothing here requires logging in.
The capture shows [deleted] too. Is the comment gone for good?
Not necessarily. That capture was simply taken after the deletion. Step back through the capture list to an earlier date; a capture from before the deletion shows the text. If every capture shows the placeholder, the comment was deleted before anything crawled the thread, and no public copy exists.
Why do old.reddit.com captures show more comments than new Reddit ones?
Old Reddit sends the comment tree as plain HTML, so the crawler saved whatever was on the page, usually the first two to five hundred comments. The redesign loads most comments by script after the page arrives, and the crawler leaves before that happens, so its captures often hold the post and a handful of top comments. PeekVault checks both hosts for every link and merges the lists.
Does this work for comments a moderator removed?
Often better than for author deletions. Moderator removals usually happen after a comment drew replies and reports, and by then the thread has often been crawled. For removals from the last few months, Reveddit can also show the text, and PeekVault links to it whenever a lookup comes back empty.
The user deleted their whole account. Can I still find their comments?
Frequently. Deleting an account replaces the username with [deleted] but leaves the comments in place unless the user also deleted them one by one, and captures taken while the account existed still show the name. If they wiped their comments first, the thread captures from before the wipe are the only remaining copy. The Reddit archive page can also list captures of the profile page itself.
Is this Unddit, Removeddit or Ceddit?
No. Those sites read from Pushshift, which stopped serving the public when Reddit changed its API terms in 2023, so they have shown nothing since. PeekVault reads Internet Archive captures instead. That means it covers comments in threads that were crawled, not every comment ever posted, but it does not depend on Reddit's permission to keep working.
Will the commenter or the moderators know I read it?
No. The capture is served by web.archive.org. Reddit never receives the request, nobody is notified, and PeekVault does not keep a record of what you opened.
Can I recover my own deleted comments this way?
Sometimes, from captures of the threads or of your profile page, the same way as anyone else's. For a complete copy of your own history, Reddit's account settings have a 'Request my data' option that returns every comment you ever posted, including deleted ones, within a few days.
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