I suspect it's more likely the site didn't process the deletions properly, rather than maliciously bringing them back, or as you suggest, that they were private.
Edit: It's possible that the deletion only worked on public posts, after all, it seems?
Checking just now I see that comments up to 3 - 4 years old have been restored.
I'm not going to speculate as to why (beyond agreeing it's more likely to be incompetence than malice) but in my case at least there are definitely long deleted comments that have been restored.
I very much doubt Reddit cares at all about the small number of us that have done this.
They don't mention being able to delete from private subs, and their method of deletion sounds like it would fail when the subs are set to private.
I'll admit Reddit barely deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point, but I have no idea how you would delete posts on private subs except through some GDPR way that must exist.
Musk and Hoffman seem to be intent on waging war with their own product. They both get a lot of unpaid labour producing their content and then complain that the unpaid labour isn’t paying for the privilege.
Assuming the worst, ignoring details that violate the narrative, and circulating ragebait without verification are all staples of mainstream Reddit content.
It’s not surprising that the Reddit outrage/grievance machine has turned on itself and is now assuming the worst and getting outraged at every turn.
Just ask that moderator accused of being Ghislaine Maxwell.
If i wrote public forum software, that's how I would do it and batch delete only comments that no one asked to undelete in at least a few months...
They usually store some history in a logging database that can be reverted at some point in time
Nothing is really truly hard deleted on the web most times
Might have changed in the past 2 years, but unlikely.
So the question would be, if Reddit also stores comment edit history.
I'll wait and see how this plays out (while deleting my comments from the previously private communities.)
It's just the same cycle over and over. As time has demonstrated dozens of times, HN isn't good at forecasting nor is representative at all of most end-users. The great majority of Reddit users (and this doesn't include me) use the official app or the official website and therefore besides this very short protest which will end soon as like many other protests in the past for different reasons, Reddit will just continue to be as popular.
The other major difference is content. On WA you only care about the content your direct friends/family create, on Reddit the masses are dependent on a few to submit comment (and even comment, there are a ton of lurkers who never comment, might not even up/down vote). If WA content goes to shit you can tell your BIL to stop sending you crap, if Reddit content goes to shit (due to loss of power users or moderation) it's a much harder problem to solve.
The WA exodus always struck me as way too difficult, getting friends/family to switch messaging platforms is super hard. Reddit? Might be unlikely but I was in the Digg->Reddit migration and I'm 100% looking for where I want to move now that Reddit is acting this way.
As time has demonstrated dozens of times, platforms, behaviors and manias come an go in regular (though not quite predictable) bursts.
Betting that nothing ever changes is not consistent with the general arc of developments in the broader technology space.
Actually the opposite is likely true. The digital landscape is very "disruptable" and relies on various dark patterns (oligopolies, user illiteracy) to lock-in some "stability".
The individual events you mention are not the flood, they are the thunder indicating a thunderstorm is brewing.
See the other Reddit post (one about Reddit punting mods if they act against the interests of Reddit itself, which has always been true it's worth noting) with 100s of comments, folded into pages and pages of continuations.
I mean does anyone honestly seriously believe Reddit purposefully undeleted this guy's comments? Reddit suspends accounts en mass, and when they do they nuke their entire history of comments on the site [I have been corrected, though I've strangely seen accounts get removed and all of their comments disappear too, though maybe they're running a script]. Reddit just really doesn't care about this guy's comments as much as he thinks they do.
That's not quite true, if an account is permanently suspended, the user page is unavailable for viewing, but the comments still remain in their respective threads.
It's only if an account is shadowbanned site-wide that all the comments are automatically removed too. This is intended only for spammer accounts, but can hit genuine users who are both newly created and end up being downvoted below a certain threshold.
It seems unlikely that their comments specifically were targeted, but it seems entirely plausible that a site-wide restoration took place that included their comments.
It also could be a bug.
While that would be nice, I doubt it. The quality of content might suffer and smaller subreddits will finally be where large ones have been for a long time, but for the vast majority of users who doomscroll and share memes, nothing much will change and reddit will continue.
this might be true, but this content is not what made reddit valuable
as with twitter, the fundamental question is: where do the large numbers of contributors of quality information / discussion (a small fraction of billions is still a huge number) go for a sane, long-term sustainable online platform that will not turn into the next Library of Alexandria
I don't think I will be returning to reddit. Just deleted a decade and thousands of comments. There are clearly many other ways to build online communities and I think a lot of people are more motivated than ever to develop those alternatives now. Eventually one of those alternatives will possibly kill reddit but I don't think the current exodus and subreddit protests will.
Twitter and Facebook still seem to be doing okay.
The cycle continues.
Anyone who has used Reddit for any period of time (or basically any similar site, which includes FB, Twitter, and even HN), has seen data consistency issues during high load (like periods of activism). Shards die or fall out of quorum, work queues get purged, etc. That's the reality of systems with a lot of very low value data.
Eventually consistent, but also perpetually inconsistent.
No database shard would ever have been left that far out of date due to high load.
The only Hanlon's razor I can imagine here is somebody wrote a query to try to undelete something small (intending a single user or something) and forgot the WHERE clause and started to undelete everything. And didn't realize until the query had been executing for several minutes.
Yikes.
(I do actually think this is the most likely, not because of spez's motivations, but because there's zero benefit for Reddit here. It might make sense for them to force subreddits back to public, but undeleting old comments has no strategic value right now.)
The obvious benefit would be to artificially keep interaction rates high by "grave robbing" old comments and accounts.
"Nobody is ever going to notice, those accounts are long dead!"
People are going back to revisit things they think they deleted a long time ago to find it not deleted.
It's possible that those items were deleted, and then suddenly undeleted over the past few days as Reddit plies its nefarious plans. Far more likely, they were never deleted in the first place, or had the same temporal issue and reappeared a short while after deletion, but long long ago. The person thought it was deleted, but it wasn't for the same reason people are finding deletes not to stick now in some cases.
It's still possible that this is innocent(ish), but at low enough probability that malice really does seem like a compelling alternative explanation. After all, spez has been caught doing something very similar before. There's proof of malicious nature, not just an assumption. When a component in a system has a certain known behavior or limit, you don't just discard that knowledge due to some handy rule of thumb.
(Of course this is assuming pushsift has gotten the majority of comments)
The more posts we see deleted the less likely it is that it's an accident. I just checked and found out that posts from an account that I scrubbed and deleted 5 years ago are popping back up. That stretches "eventual" pretty thin.
We also have a large amount of external information that suggests that reddit is not acting in good faith, much of it from Spez himself.
Between the two of those, malice is more likely than stupidity to be the motivating factor.
I care more about what a 'deleted' post says, than any other post in a thread. I imagine there is a good reason for that.
Of course this isn't "heavily regulated". No law demands 100% consistency when you run some third party script during an outage. Clicking "delete" on a comment, or having a script do it, is not some GPDR enforced action.
That's not the case here because I consider HN to be the equivalent of a single Subreddit, so the information is less diverse. I don't talk about every facet of my life here.
On the other hand, I'm the kind of person who uses a different username on every forum. It's a habit I picked up in the early days of the internet.
This is especially useful in this era where even news organization websites will quote your online username to add to their stories.
I switched my outlook on life a while back.
I take somewhat Buddhist Lite approach to life and consider possessions as misery and so on.
I extend that to online conversations.
I just delete them and clear my history. I don’t feel everything I’ve ever written online, every message and every email should live online forever.
It’s a mental burden that I don’t want.
So I auto delete where I can.
It’s cathartic. I think I started doing it during my burnout nervous breakdown phase after exiting corporate life.
I found I’d write things on Slack and then delete them. The anxiety of having my thoughts out there weighed on me.
Thoughts and conversations should be transient, I feel.
Each to their own! :-)
Long long story short, I probably made some comment on some apparently "bad" forum years ago (let's say, 2012). And hell, I was dwnvoted vehemently and was arguing a storm against it. But because those mass taggers just care about where you post, and not what you post, I was labeled as a bigot. No big deal. Years later (maybe 2015) I deleted most of my older comments anyway as some transition phase as I left college.
Then in 2018 or so some person called me that specific bigoted phrase. Remember, this would be 3 years ago, and I commented heavily. No way any human on a video game subreddit cared enough about me to dig through 3 years of comment history (which by then would be mostly video games and anime) to find comments they disagreed with. Especially when those comments don't exist on my profile. I was clearly mass tagged and someone wanted an easy insult.
So I just threw that all away. grabbed the saved posts I cared about, deleted some 6 year old account and restarted in a new handle. I didn't want to bother with any future drama that was already well behind me. Because reddit doesn't care if my account is 6 days old or 6 years old; there's no difference. Why bother trying to redeem some crude handle I made up on the spot in the beginning of college?
----
TLDR there are very annoying redditors who will troll histories and tag you without context and I was tired of dealing with that.
And even if they contain personally identifiable data, the user would need to request the deletion of these ¨PI data from reddit. I am not sure simply deleting your messages yourself counts as requesting the deletion of personal data under GDP.
Does publishing the dataset as CC sidestep GDPR? Because Reddit has published their dataset via fh-bigquery:Reddit in the past etc.
Using GDPR adversarially like this is interesting and I’m not sure where it stops. Technically all IP is originated by a human at some point and then sublicensed to an employer etc. Can you just ragequit and demand your workplace GDPR everything? How is the consideration of cash employment fundamentally different from the consideration of using the social network?
Not saying it should or shouldn’t be upheld but under maximalist interpretations GDPR is incompatible with IP sublicensing in general, if the originator always has the option to take back their content how do you ever reach an enforceable license?
I'm curious, why do you do that?
You have the right to ask for deletion of personal information they store, and even that has certain limits. You don't have the right to force the company to delete content unless they granted you that right via the licence somehow.
Whether this is a good or bad idea for a company to do is a different question. But I don't see a legal issue here like the linked post claims.
In the EU, you definitely do.
For a clear example of the difference: I don't have the right under GDPR to tell Apple to reach into everyone else's iCloud address books to delete my phone number out of them. Neither I nor Apple put my phone number into other people's address books; those other people manually entered that info into their address books themselves. Which makes that their data, that they created — which just happens to reference me (and which is held in trust by a third party.)
If GDPR worked the way you're imagining, then someone deleting their WhatsApp account would require WhatsApp to tell my phone to delete my locally-saved WhatsApp chat-logs of conversations with that person.
The content of a post is not personal data (in general) but the things like user name etc are. The content is not relating to an identifiable person (in general) while the user name is.
Shakespeare's poems are not personal data.
And that is the heart of one the problems with reddit or any other site that encourages people to post everything under the sun. You are giving up control of what then happens with your content.
I suppose this would constitute indirect identification of a data subject under GDPR?
> I said it before and I say it again: if you have the patience to do so then make sure you overwrite your content with chatgpt generated content, as the future AI that will feed on your post HATE feeding on already AI generated stuff. It makes the AI diverge.
People should not be deleting their posts but actually just replacing them with random AI generated content. This will make Reddit a mess.
In modern chaotic world usually the best weapon against something you don't like is to just ignore it (there are exceptions of course).
Worse, the data is already archived by the data collection services. The people who suffer are going to be average users trying to find some answer to a question by searching Reddit, only to discover jumbled messes of words that don’t make sense.
It hasn't been maintained in a while, but I can confirm that it still works.
EDIT: Here is another alternative. I haven't used this one myself but it seems legit: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I would also be surprised if Reddit didn’t add such logic if they figure out this (editing older content to replace it with gibberish) is happening. It seems like reasonable logic to have in place anyway.
To be clear, I’m not siding with Reddit on this. Just saying it seems odd they even allow it in the first place, especially for comments — the top level post may make sense to allow edits, but even then there’s usually a publicly visible edit history.
The AI thing is clever.
EDIT: found the pic https://i.imgur.com/45M3a8c.png
Maybe even an option to keep it running and randomly update posts with GPT nonsense over time?
However, if this catches on and becomes more prevalent (and I could see that happening), then I'd expect some kind of cyber-vandalism law to be enacted. They can't prosecute based on hacking, because it isn't. But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property by editing to add content that knowingly will mess with their algs. Sooner than that though will be an addition to the EULA, that users cannot enter AI generated content or they agree to get fined, or some such nastiness.
The Cyberpunk RPG came out in 1988, and I was in my early 20s. Each decade since I've marvelled at how much closer to that dystopian world we've gotten, and the slope of the downward slide increases every decade.
Why do I say that?
Because the image of Reddit that's been in my head until today is of an Open Source type thing started by Aaron Schwartz. He was a founder, but that is not today's Reddit. I did some cursory digging and found Reddit is primarily owned (majority shareholder) by Advance Publications, Inc. These are the same people who own, or majorly own (primary or major shareholder): Conde Nast and all its subsidiaries (which now owns Ars Technica), American City Business Journals, Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery, the Ironman Triathlons, many newspapers, Turnitin.com, and probably more. In 2019 Advance Publications was named the largest privately owned American company.
This is the way we're going - totally the opposite way.
The reddit FAQ around deleting your account[0] suggests that they'll just 'dissociate' your posts from your account (so the user says [deleted]) and remove your account data which should be fine for GDPR purposes.
This[1] support page says mods/admins can't recover your deleted posts for you but stops a little short of saying that it's impossible for them to do it for themselves.
So pretty scummy behaviour but I don't think anything they're doing is illegal (IANAL!).
[0] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304793... [1] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004348345...
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
Maybe Reddit users don't qualify for "Right to Erasure" because Reddit is still going, their data is being used, they technically didn't revoke "consent" and so on?
I understand that the GDPR allows you to request deletion of your private data, but content you’ve published isn’t quite the same. At the very least, Reddit’s TOS claim a perpetual irrevocable license to that content
Does the GDPR have a separate provision for requesting the deletion of published content, or are people just assuming it falls under the private data rules?
This seems like such an unwise thing for them to do that I feel like there must be another explanation.
I run forums and have done for +20y.
Reddit may have a user agreement that allows them to use the data forever, but historical versions that were not visible (effectively soft-deleted on edit) puts this into a risk area as it removes the ability for someone to control the data thus transferring ownership far more explicitly to Reddit.
Reddit should be very cautious here... you only get a lot of protections (EU eCommerce Act, etc) but being mere conduit. Arguably volunteer moderators took on a lot of the liability by their act of moderating, and Reddit were able to distance themselves from a lot of the content on the platform.
But once Reddit go intervening in the content, choosing to make some old revisions public, they're now taking editorial decisions that strip them of a lot of the things that protect them.
This is an incredibly naive move in the big picture.
That's shockingly small. Like, can we just build some retro love-child of unison and NNTP, and just keep a copy of all the news groups on our laptops / the ones we care about on our phones?
Anyway, from a liability perspective, undeleting stuff older than that seems to be a moot point.
If they don’t comply, they’ll get fined, and I have the feeling it will not be a small one given how they handle things
Could be an intentional small-scale data rollback that has accidentally had far wider effect. Or some “eventually consistent” anomaly where nodes that never saw the changes/deletes have reasserted the version of reality they still see.
But back to the previous hand…
> seems like such an unwise thing for them to do
Doing unwise things then doubling down on them seems to be Reddit's MO at the moment, and that has been the case for a while so each re-doubling currently means a notable jump in unwiseness, so I'm not surprised enough by any given apparent iffy decision that I reach for other explanations by default.
I hope its that and not something more dubious.
Plus of course the rest of the internet still likely has your deleted/edited comment. So nothing public is really lost, with any assurance at least heh.
And some online shops do that too at checkout; if you fill in your email but then abandon it, you might get an email that says "Hey, you didn't finish your purchase!". My worst experience was with a phone provider, I just wanted to see how much a mobile package was priced, but I had to add it to a cart. I put in my real number and email and the fuckers added me to their marketing database, sending me SMS ads. Fuck youuu salt.ch!
The funny thing is that this is all over a stupid API that was causing more harm to Reddit than it was functioning as a public service. Apps were functioning as alternatives to the Reddit website and app.
The whole thing about API back in 2000s is it allows users to interface with Reddit programmably. Remember the first Web3.0? Who would have thought it would be used to create an entirely alternate app market?
Every platform eventually pivots to paid APIs. Twitter did a long time back by buying all of the alt apps.
Lesson: APIs are expensive to maintain and no real P̶r̶o̶f̶i̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ (edit: profit-driven) business is going to keep them around unselfishly.
First of all: if Reddit really is doing this, then it is committing an illegal act. At least in the EU, I'm sure in other jurisdictions also. There are in fact laws protecting the users. Second of all: Reddit cannot force users to post and moderate, and without those things there is no Reddit. Have you heard of Digg, by any chance?
> The funny thing is that this is all over a stupid API that was causing more harm to Reddit than it was functioning as a public service.
It was absolutely functioning as a public service, because third-party apps are the only ones that are actually usable. Especially so for moderator activities (that Reddit depends on to exist) and even more especially so for blind people, to whom Reddit official app does not cater.
Do you know what else functions as a public service? Unpaid moderators!
> The whole thing about API back in 2000s is it allows users to interface with Reddit programmably.
I remember those times very well, and that was not "the whole thing" at all, there was a "bait and switch" from independent forums to centralized services based on a promise of openness forever. But I digress. Who cares what the "whole thing was about back in 2000s"? It doesn't matter what it was about, the only thing that matters is what the situation is now, and the situation is that Reddit as we know it is an interdependent partnership between a company and an extensive international community. This is what survived to 2023 and this is what matters in 2023.
> Lesson: APIs are expensive to maintain and no real profitable business is going to keep them around unselfishly.
Another lesson: a profitable business cannot extract value from the unpaid work of enthusiasts while at the same time expecting to be able to treat said enthusiasts as valueless replaceable cogs.
Digg lost because they changed the website, Reddit has not changed here.
> third-party apps are the only ones that are actually usable
In your opinion. Millions of users just use the site and official app.
> valueless replaceable cogs.
Which they are. Plenty of mods are ready to take care of popular subreddits.
Some users will be lost, but they are the minority.
The only mistake Reddit is making is by waiting too long to reign in the popular subreddits and allowing people to protest on Reddit’s own homepage.
They just seem to be doing things out of order. Another example: alienate long-time users and mods by making it abundantly clear that they're product and free labor really should have come after the IPO.
Then ask for that, similar to youtube red? You estimate how much each person would net you in ad revenue and ask them to contribute that much.
It could be phrased as "do you like reddit? contribute to its upkeep."
Better: it's about introducing pricing for said API without proper advance, so apps consuming it couldn't in turn adjust their pricing because they had plenty people on annual subscriptions.
With enough forewarning the market would have adjusted to the new pricing, but that didn't happen.
Stupid question, but did anyone ever /trust/ online social sites to do what they claimed when it came to managing user data?
User data has always been the core of freemium apps and “aggregators”: land-grab as many users as you can with a free, great product, so you can own a lot user data. We just didn’t have an obvious use for all that data until now.
Reddit won’t budge on the API pricing because they can make more selling datasets. But if they are smart, they’d rate limit free API access, and charge for the firehose — because then they’d have a user-generated content farm. But you still have the issue that people keep expecting their free apps to be free, not realizing they have been selling their data all along.
Remember FourSquare? They started as a neat way for people to socially compete in “checkins” for a place. They found their profit in selling that location data for business analytics and real estate analysis. The implications extend beyond commercial concerns when datasets like that are purchased by governments to circumvent wiretapping warrant requirements.
Probably not. Of course, the mental test is very extreme, but it proofs that the guarantees offered will fail and be violated when some threshold is exceed. It's not a sign and done deal.
> Deleting Your Account
> You may delete your account information at any time from the user preferences page. You can also submit a request to delete the personal information Reddit maintains about you by following the process described below this table. When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users and disassociated from content you posted under that account. Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content. After you submit a request to delete your account, it may take up to 90 days for our purge script to complete deletion. We may also retain certain information about you as required by law or for legitimate business purposes.
If you say you are deleting information and they don't do it, they are violating their privacy agreement.
Of course, that is in clear conflict with their TOS. [1]
> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-...
I, for example, deleted every comment I ever posted on Reddit, but left my account itself in place. As of this morning, many of my comments appear to have been restored.
The privacy policy is explicitly saying that deleting your account does not delete your comments.
They repeatedly chose short term gain over the long term health of their platforms/users, and the debt is catching up with them.
It's technically impossible to identify correct personal information in users' posts.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...
Reddit will anonymize -- well, "anonymize" -- the data by disassociating posts and comments from the username. This is potentially gdpr compliant (anonymity is a valid way to do things!). There's separately a balancing act: eg a post is valuable to everyone who commented in the thread.
So it's not clear that this is wrong, and forcing them to go further will be a slow process involving complaining to a country-specific DPA; getting that DPA to take on what will be a very low-priority case; letting the DPA process play out; and seeing if Reddit will appeal.
What they've done though it go way too far - so far they are undeleting posts from over a decade ago. Reddit didn't actually delete anything, only soft deletes.
In the image posted there are also cached thumbnails from YouTube - those videos no longer exist.
I've already had one trans person confirm there are posts appearing from before their transition.
The IPO is really going great for them with such a huge GDPR Privacy violation...
It’s user hostile, and prevents the spread of knowledge.
IF that was their past behavior when this happened (what you describe has been happening since the inception of Reddit) that would be one thing.
Neither of those things are the case, Reddit has shown they have always had the ability to create these features (vote out mods, fix modding tools, improve accessibility, prevent comment deletion) but refused to do so until it actually hurt their bottom line. That's scummy.
They don’t owe you anything.
[0]: https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/
> Repost deleted/removed information. Remember that comment someone just deleted because it had personal information in it or was a picture of gore? Resist the urge to repost it. It doesn't matter what the content was. If it was deleted/removed, it should stay deleted/removed.
Click context on my recent comment.
By undeleting comments they are violating the copyright of the authors by engaging in unauthorized use
Even if Reddit was the one that deleted it, the user needs to be informed if Reddit renews their use of the copyrighted work.
Where the user deleted it, the violation is beyond obvious.
Trying to delete things is an exercise in futility.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Other deletion tools I've tried also don't work because of this.
I.e what unddit.com did for reddit
What're reddit decided to do here is almost certainly against european law and I expect we'll hear more about it over the following months.
I firmly believe that in the future, what you say doesn't matter. What matters is what you can prove you've said.
What's the difference between the following two? (a) You say something and someone takes a screenshot of it, and (b) Someone just conjures up a fake screenshot of you saying something. These are indistinguishable. With LLM and SD, these fakes will become easier and easier.
The solution is some crypto that allows you to do two things: (a) Be able to prove that you said something, and (b) later revoke it, such that your prove doesn't work anymore and there's no trace it was ever used.
So I just ran Nuke Reddit History and deleted them all again.
What was accomplished?
Edit: On further inspection, maybe so. It’s possible they’re still in process or maybe I had it cached.
This would disable my users / victims from deleting their stuff (thus decreasing the value of my platform temporarily) while probably complying with GDPR.
I would also consider copying Twitters URL shortener.
Muhaha
Having said that - people are scraping and archiving Reddit all the time for both good and not so good purposes - so maybe it's not a big deal?
Not only is the post accessible, but when you go from that to the entire Reddit submission, you can clearly see that it's not deleted.
Reddit not only does not have a bona fide implementation of deletion, but has hacks in place to thwart deletions that replace text by random "lorem ipsum" before deleting. These changes affect your post timeline only, not the in-thread originals.
* Unregistered users: Public, non-age restricted content(whether that be as a subreddit requirement or post-specific thing).
* Registered users: same as above, minus content that was published by individual users and deleted afterwards, content removed by moderators or in more extreme cases reddit themselves(last one is a bit of a special case, I'll come to that part later).
* Moderators: they see everything that was posted by other users and subsequently removed by the moderators for whatever reason. If a user deletes their contribution personally, then moderators won't see it either.
* Content removed by reddit: visible by reddit employees, appears as "Removed by Reddit" to anyone else. In this particular instance, reddit may remove contents that was removed by moderators already.
I'm a moderator of 2 large subs and a few smaller ones. Luckily I developed a backup system, which effectively backs up everything that was ever published on the sub(plus a ton of other stuff, including image recognition, lightweight nlp and tracking what reddit removes. Without saying which subreddit I'm talking about, I can tell you that a lot more is happening in large communities(20+k people online at any given time) than you might think.
So in the case mentioned here, it's simply a case of some "status" field in some database that was flicked. Which is kind of concerning, given the amount of contents me and the other mods have removed. Truth be told, the moderation tools that reddit provide are rat shit. I ended up developing a ton of custom ones(completely nuking a specific user's history, chained comments or entire comment sections. Things, which reddit has been promosing for years but never delivered. Funny enough, all of those are a question of 30 lines of code in total, if we are talking about a single-script type of thing. But it is worrying that stuff like this happened. Just earlier today I used one of those scripts to nuke 300+ comments in a post. I also keep a backup of the mod log so in theory I could undo the damage. Question is, how long would that take. We are talking about 500k action we've collectively taken over the past year. Some through a script, plenty manually however.
Despite all the drama lately, I don't think that's a deliberate retaliation from reddit due to the blackout, more likely a "woops" moment that happened at a very inconvenient time for reddit.
I can confirm that they are back.
However I don't see them on my profile, which is even more sneaky and infuriating. It makes searching for them (to delete again) hard.
not sure if this meant as sarcasm or not
That way the discussion is still there for people in the diture to follow but someone can't go through your comment history to learn about your political view or wealth or whatever people look for.
That accounts seem of normal people engaging in normal conversations. But they spit hate everywhere they go, it is just not reflected in their history.
Several logins from '127.0.0.1' attributed to my account: Reddit staff logs in and performs actions as users without their knowledge or consent.
If so, this seems like an impulsive miscalculation, based on how easy it would be for any determined actor to scrape reddit. So why annoy users in order to attempt to do something that has a high probability of failure?
The situation sounds a lot like news website paywalling circa 2010, which was a flop for most sites.
Magic algorithm for everyone’s benefit I’m sure …
Is it possibly they are specifically geotargeting IP's to undelete stuff and therefore avoid GDPR?
Tangent: I used to love reddit, i would actively pay for reddit gold just to support the site. I still have a hard time moving on, but this latest fiasco has set things in stone for me. RIP Reddit.
It's equivalent to a librarian restoring some of their books that have been vandalised by a disgruntled author.
