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.
Unless the objective isn't to deescalate.
If there's no due process, reddit doesn't deserve to be held innocent.
Oh, the sleighthanded irony.
Same guy who un-personed Aaron Swartz, claiming he wasn't a cofounder after Swartz died, and removing him from Reddit's founder page.
I think it makes sense for anyone who values objective truth above any other agenda. "Benefit of the doubt" is just acknowledging that we don't know for sure.
It's what normal people did before the internet.
People who didn't were known as lynch mobs, and were considered bad.
Thanks to the web, it's now perfectly normal to believe the worst of people for no better reason than to fuel one's own anger issues.
I believe that in this case it's more that Reddit's management has completely lost any sort of trust, it's not so much to fuel one's own anger issues but give the current context there's very little in terms of Reddit's management being trustworthy, transparent. Spez was caught lying in the open, how can one still have any trust they aren't lying in other aspects?
Let's agree that this particular case is not a baseless witch hunt, Reddit's management own dishonest actions have brought a dissatisfied lynching mob to them.
I do seem to recall that their database schema is mostly a big unstructured key-value table, so it's possible that this is part of the explanation - and they've never cleaned up any garbage/orphans in at least 3 years?
Meh. You're not exactly wrong but I think it's pretty common for user-generated content sites to follow a logical delete strategy. It holds open the door to being able to restore data deleted by end-user error, and within the bounds of their data retention policy keeps data around that may be useful for internal analysis.
Actually come to think of it seems plausible that they only have ~3 years of logically deleted data, having purged deleted records older than that.
It's also plausible they had all the is-logically-deleted information in some redis datastore that wasn't being reliably persisted to disk and the process had to be restarted for the first time 3 years.
I'm actually leaving my restored comments untouched for now out of curiosity about what they'll do about it now that the issue is known. I think that will probably answer the question about whether this was accidental or intentional.
I wouldn't put it past Reddit to restore old comments given sufficient motivation, I just have a hard time imaging how the cost/benefit analysis would say that this is a good idea at this specific point in time.
It seems plausible that with all the other churn going on at Reddit - and as others have noted a large number of people deleting comments and accounts and maybe subs - that they accidentally restored some data-store to the wrong snapshot or something.
I just don't understand how the difference between "we HAVE N million comments" and "N million comments HAVE BEEN posted" in some investment deck could be worth the risk to reputation and good will, not to mention potential GDPR violations or bad press from doxing stalking victims or whatever.
Someone else mentioned SEO as a possible motivation. I might buy that. If Reddit is losing PV and DAU and restoring a bunch of old content would offset some of that with organic search traffic, that seems like something they might do.
For most users this isn't going to be a problem but my guess is there is a rather big chance for a number of the comments that were restored there were really good reason why they were deleted and now Reddit are responsible for them being online again.
how did you check? profile page?
