Reddit undeleting comments and hiding them
Reddit undeleting comments and hiding them
I came across today one of my own comments on Reddit with a search on duckduckgo. It was still intact. The problem is I used shreddit to randomise and delete the entire contents of my account. My account comments and posts all show empty on my account pages on reddit so there should be nothing.
I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them. Its curious that they don't appear on my accounts content on Reddit and yet a search engine can find them and they are still served by Reddit. Ex Reddit users who deleted their account contents should be aware this is happening and report it as a GDPR breach to their respective agencies if they are in the EU if they too find this has occurred.
You're viewing a single thread.
Several of us have noticed this since the protests and mass exodus started. It did seem that editing then deleting might protect against Reddit's restoration of posts and comments.
Update: Just checked. They've restored a lot of my old posts. This may turn into a years-long game of whack-a-mole trying to actually get our material deleted from that site.
This is exactly why (plus laziness) that I haven't even bothered. They're just going to put them back anyway.
I do have a post pinned in my account directing people to Lemmy though.
I PMed someone on Twitter asking them to use Mastodon. As soon as I sent the PM, Twitter temporarily locked my account for "suspicious activity". I had to basically fill out a captcha to get my account back, but it didn't send the message.
I rewrote it while being more careful with my phrasing and misspelling "mastedon" the second time.
Well, if they did suspend my account for doing that, I doubt I'll ever find out.
Several of us have noticed this since the protests and mass exodus started.
They haven't restored anything. Any script or service you used can only access the most recent 1000 comments in your history. The problem is half of you people rushing to use these tools for the first time have no idea how they work.
I manually deleted everything reddit chose to show in my profile over the course of a week. I only stopped once absolutely NO comments or posts were shown in "new" reddit, old.reddit, and all types of sorting (old,new,top,hot,controversial). Waited an additional day and then checked again, just to make sure I really got everything. There simply was nothing left in my profile anymore.
Afterwards(!) I used "shreddit" and it found nearly a thousand effing more things to delete (981 comments to be precise). Ran it twice, and the second go didn't find any more comments or posts.
My account is deleted now, and I can STILL find comments that are definitely mine but no longer attributed to my account (it says [deleted] where the username originally was) but since the account no longer exists, I can not edit/delete them again.
There is definitely something fishy with that site.
I understood that you cannot view, edit, or delete posts and comments from communities that are set to private. So if you run shreddit and a community later becomes public again, your posts can resurface.
Yes, but I definitely found comments that were mine, which didn't show up in my account but showed up in the threads where they were posted, purely through Google searches just like the one described on this post.
The community wasn't set to private anymore during that time tho: r/breath_of_the_wild reopened immediatly after the protests.
It's not fishy (at least not intentionally so). It's a limitation of their database. It can only show 1000 comments. So it won't find your very old posts when you sort by them.
So they're not restoring comments. It's just very difficult to find your old comments to actually delete them.
I am talking about comments that I manually deleted tho. I saved certain comments first before deleting so I know that they're the same ones that I manually nuked.
The answer to that post is mine, and I saved that comment because I wanted to use it for a guide later. It was definitely DELETED the day I closed my account, and it is the 1:1 same text as the saved comment, so I defo didn't just confuse it with a different / similar comment.
Please ELI5 to me how it is "just a limitation of their database" that this comment exists, even tho it did originally pop up in the comment list AND was deleted.
PS: this is just one example of many many others - a whole lot of my longer in-depth comments are simply back again. And that sub was no longer set to "private" during that time.
Any script or service you used can only access the most recent 1000 comments in your history.
This isn't quite 100% true. Shreddit supports getting its comment list from a GDPR request, and if you do that, then it CAN access the older comments and delete them, it just doesn't have any other way than that data request file to know about their existence.
That's exactly what I did with redact.dev. You plug in the zip file and it uses the enclosed .csv files to find the posts and comments to delete. Has nothing to do with arbitrary db limitations or profiles at all.
It should also be noted that California, where Reddit is based, also has some GDPR-style privacy laws. People were posting the sources last month when Reddit first started undeleting deleted content, and that guy posted a video on YouTube of himself manually deleting comments and then having Reddit restore the exact comments he had deleted, which is supposed to be impossible.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Oh, and obligatory fuck Reddit, and fuck the shills who come here to defend that corrupt shit.
I'm manually deleting everything and still seeing the same thing.
Yes, I noticed this as well. I had to feed my GDPR export into a program to delete comments as the scripts that used reddit to find comment history didn't go back far enough and did a terrible job. Even with that some comments caused errors which may have been due to some subs still being private at the time so I will do another pass.
And predictably the only guy in the thread who understands how Reddit's listings work was downvoted. I guess some things never change.
I'm pretty sure they got downvoted for being rude
It appears Mlem doesn’t allow you to edit comments. Weird.
Yeah, the tech illiteracy in this thread is depressing. But people don't seem interested in the mundane reason this is happening. They just want to be mad at reddit.
here you go, this is my account overview
Now explain to me the tech illiteracy or the mundane reason this is happening. I deleted EVERYTHING off my account a month ago, and have created a single post since.
I'm leaving it up just so people can see that this is indeed happening. I would instantly delete it otherwise. I found it just like OP found his posts.
Edit: Here's a Pic of the comment, just in case. Notice the time on my phone, I took this after posting this comment.
Edit 2: I can keep going, just keep asking me for more proof and I'm more than happy to find more shit, from my phone, from my PC, old reddit, new reddit... Go ahead and find my account on reddit and do the searches yourself if you want. First posts are duds, but you'll find more content of mine if you keep looking through Google.
It's not you It's reddit profiles, they don't show more than the top N posts in whatever sorting order
You can delete everything in /user/new, then sort by "top" and notice there's still stuff there. There is no way to list it all and delete it all. And if you delete the whole account to at least anonymize the comments, they might bring stuff back (that you deleted) and there'll be no way to remove them anymore.
As I mentioned, I went through the whole process a month ago, when I did see this exact behavior and I understand it perfectly. Right now, though? Why wouldn't it show up at all? After a month with my account mostly empty, I'd expect to be able to see such comments. Yet, no matter how I sort it all, I don't see those comments.
When you edit or delete your content, it remains in Pushshift (the database) and all that changes is the access. This is the way it has been for years, and why you could easily view moderator removed comments via Ceddit, Unddit, Reveddit, and the like. User delete and moderator remove are just hide buttons for the content.
Keeping that in mind, how hard would it be for Reddit to fuck around with that hiding just a bit more so as to not lose its content: not hard at all, as easy as mass approving comments when admin unbans someone (this is a frequent complaint on r/modsupport, lol).
When Reddit restricted the API, they restricted the ability to view hidden data via making calls to Pushshift, but that does NOT mean the backend has changed at all.
Anyone facing this problem should look at r/reveddit, where its creator u/rhaksw has urged people to continue viewing their own data via Reveddit even though they cannot now see everyone else's because of the API restrictions. He explains it a lot better than I could, and how to get your own API key.
EDITED TO ADD (and remove direct Reddit link):
YouTube short on how to get your own Reddit API key: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ogv3ZU6dg
There are those of us using our GDPR data request output with shreddit or redact.dev, and that bypasses the profile altogether, as the .csv tells shreddit or redact what to delete.
Reddit has given us plenty of legitimate reasons. It's disappointing seeing people fall for conspiracy theories. Reddit doesn't care that you've deleted your comments. It really reveals something I think, and that is a self centered-ness that people have that reddit would find their comments so valuable that they would create a mechanism to restore them after deletion. People who propagate this conspiracy theory reveal more about themselves than anything else.
Why would comments not show up on your overview but show up on threads they were posted on? How hard can it be to do a SELECT WHERE on a db? Even if you assume things get cropped for performance, eventually the comments should show up in your account overview. I found one today, which just didn't show up in my account overview, and I deleted EVERYTHING on my account a month ago.
Reddit uses something called listings which contain 1000 items. If you have more than 1000 comments on your account, you will only ever be able to view the last 1000 of them on a page like that. If you delete 50 comments, the listing is now only 950, it does not refill.