Saving the gold while you clean: the whitelist.

Most people who never clean up their Reddit aren't lazy - they're scared of a slip. Somewhere in ten years of comments there are a few they'd genuinely miss, and a bulk delete feels like it might take those too.

That fear is the real thing to solve. Solve it and the rest of the cleanup gets easy.

The whitelist is the answer: mark an item as protected and it becomes untouchable - not just in the run you're about to do, but in every future sweep, every recipe, and every scheduled job. Protect it once, and you never have to think about it again.

A cleanup you trust is one where the things you love can't be deleted by accident.

The items most people would most regret losing are usually the awarded ones - the posts and comments someone gave Reddit gold or another award to. So Pro protects them for you: with preserve-gilded on, any awarded item is automatically excluded from every deletion job, even if it matches your filter or recipe.

It's the same idea as the whitelist, applied automatically to everything Reddit already considers worth an award - no manual tagging required.

The habit that makes cleanups stress-free:

• Whitelist first. Before your first big run, spend two minutes protecting the handful you know you want to keep.
• Leave preserve-gilded on. It's a safety net for the awarded items you might forget.
• Then filter freely. With the exceptions locked, you can be as aggressive as you like - the protected items simply won't appear in the delete set.

Protect the gold, then clean without holding your breath.