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Reddit users who tried to delete all their posts during the blackout inadvertently left behind everything inside the temporarily-private subreddits
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- Title
- Chris đź‘ľ (@chris@mstdn.games)
- Authors
- Chris đź‘ľ
- Published
- Jun 16 2023
Is it possible that these comments were hidden because of private subreddits and avoided the mass deletion?
I'm spending my time removing my posts and editing my comments - basically withdrawing all content I've contributed to reddit across all accounts. The oldest is 17 years but there are also others of 15 years and several more over 10.
Despite the poorer experience this will create for future readers, it's the only true power have and it is not a knee jerk reaction but has been smouldering over the past 5 years or so. I have noticed certain comments and posts suddenly re-appearing in my profiles but so far I do I think they are from the subs that were still private and have since become public. I'll be monitoring the situation very carefully though because I have exactly ZERO trust in reddit.
However there are reports about blanket restoration of deleted comments - not deleted accounts with its dissociated content hanging around. See also this sub-thread that seems to support that it's not simply content from protesting private subs
I have so little faith in the leadership of reddit and spez in particular that it's entirely believable they are mass restoring deleted content. His reaction and mishandling of the API change and protests are beyond belief including the latest plan to make moderators less powerful. He calls the very people selflessly sacrificing their time for free to curate and maintain subs to prevent them getting riddled with spam, hate, ads and all the other negatives we've all come to recognise on the internet as landed gentry.
I do also realize there are extremely toxic, abusive and power-tripping moderators and some who have far too much control of a ridiculous amount of subs, who are indeed problematic. Reddit has never had a single problem with allowing all of that to continue as usual, unhindered, when they absolutely have the internal tools to deal with it themselves, if they chose.
If this restoration of deleted content (not simply accounts) continues, I'm stubborn and bloody minded enough to find a way around it.
After 17 years, by hook or by crook, I'm going to be delete all my content and accounts permanently with the exception of a single, content-free, read-only account that will contribute nothing and use RES to make following the inevitable links to reddit I'll stumble across from the rest of the internet bearable.
Epilogue: Moderators update
This kills me when I see people excited about possible reduction of powermod issues because of this, so they're cheering it on. If any power mods get hit, it's 100% collateral damage, and Reddit will do absolutely nothing to prevent the issue from happening again (and it will).
It is almost unbelievable how badly they've handled this. A solution where everybody wins is so straightforward, but they said "nah" and every step taken has been further in the 'everybody loses' direction. It's bizarre. Even just different messaging without changing anything about the policies themselves would have prevented a lot of the drama, though it still would've been a mess. Yet almost every opportunity they've had, they chose to antagonize further. I struggle to understand it.
This is exactly my take as well. I’ve been a forum nut since the early days of the internet. It’s how I choose to interact with the net. The vast majority of my distaste comes from how Reddit leadership has acted recently. They’ve been belligerent and uncompromising at every turn. And the few times they’ve been asked to reconsider a change, they always doubled down like a spoiled child. I don’t understand or agree with this rationale. And It’s become enough to make me want to reconsider where I spend my time online.
Unfortunately, any action asking for change seems doomed at this point since people can't look a little beyond their interests. The mods coordinating the blackout messed up by making it too much about mods using 3rd party tools instead of users being unable to choose, so the usual negative sentiments around mods ruined any chance for any sort of solidarity from unaffected users.
Where did you find this email? I'd like to share it on.
I find it hilarious that now the admins have a problem with powermods, when the powermods are using their outsized influence against reddit, instead of just users. And "adding vetted moderators to the most popular subreddits", ughhh. So telling about how much they value healthy, user-run communities versus eyeballs on screens...
It's from a post in the FriendsOfSpez sub
Since the image is hosted on reddit, I copied it to imgur as it can be easily removed.
BUT. It is remiss of me to make it seem factual though. As one of that sub's mods says in the top comment of that thread
Thank you.
Yes, that's exactly what would have happened (as @nacho says below too). I've edited the title to reflect that, so some of the comments here probably seem weird now—the original title was "Reddit is restoring deleted posts".
I remember a Facebook post a long time ago. "How often do you clean your oven" which was then changed to "how often do you clean your vagina".
Maybe title corrections should be done in a more considered way like preserving the old title with a strike through and/or a tag like "missleading title"
All moderation actions can be located in the topic log found in the sidebar. Title changes are shown, including the original title.
That was my first thought too, a few of my comments weren't deleted/overwritten due to this.
This is exactly what happened. When we went private we had users sending us mod-mail freaking out that we deleted all of their history. Once the sub re-opened, it all came back. I encouraged a number of Reddit users to delete their profile history, but pointed out that it should be done before the blackout and the API shutdown. Oh well.
That is exactly what happened.
This is a conspiracy about nothing.
For as long as reddit has had private subreddits, you cannot interact with your own comments made in private subreddits if you're subsequently locked out.
Arguments on this potentially breaking terms or laws in different regions might apply, but running any sort of script to delete content in a private subreddit you don't have access to will not see or change that content.
There is no re-rolling, simply business as usual. I believe this is the same for banned subreddits, although I haven't checked this for several years.
Yeah you can. So long as the data is attributed to my account, it's personal data and falls under data protection regulations (presumably most that exist around the world, GDPR being the one I know of for sure). If you want that data gone, it might take a court case to say whether the text itself is personally identifiable, but at minimum you should be able to exercise rights such as receiving a copy and anonymising it (not just pseudonymising) by removing the link to your account.
Whether spez cares to uphold a foreign regulation, or prefers to risk having european assets seized / being denied access to the european market... that's up to him of course.
Edit: just noticed there's basically the same remark being made in another subthread here https://tildes.net/~tech/16fd/reddit_users_who_tried_to_delete_all_their_posts_during_the_blackout_inadvertently_left_behind#comment-8hb6
You're not wrong but kind of missing the point. This is in the context of running power delete suite and deleting comments on private subs.
You cannot interact with your own comments made on private subreddits while using reddit. You can't see those comments in your reddit profile and therefore, power delete suite won't work. That was the point.
I am such a user, I ran the program to delete all of my posts and comments during the blackout. Then afterwards I deactivated my account. So most likely those comments are now floating around without a username, still active.
Sure I have GDPR rights but I don't care that it is connected to me, I just want them off Reddit. And given the username is now deleted I don't even think I could get them removed in the name of GDPR - they don't have my username on them after all. Plus even if I could, I wouldn't go through the hassle of bringing a courtcase just to delete some comments.
Before we get out our pitchforks, it is possible it is simply a matter of a problem with their data synchronization. Reddit have been under quite a bit of load these days and it is very likely that whatever sharded database they use have come out of sync with all the delete requests, and there has been some sort of rollback.
This is true, but the absolute loss of trust because of their recent actions, and CEO's words as of late gives these suspicions much more traction.
Now we wait for the EU to take notice
I don't think that actually applies, no?
If you are referring to the EU right to be forgotten, you need to explicitly demand to be deleted under that right. That's a different thing than just hitting a delete button. At least as far as I understand it.
Does anyone want to read the Reddit T&C's of use?
Chances are that deleting your account doesn't mean removing the data you submitted. It removes your name associated with the text, but the text alone is Reddits.
That depends.
GDPR is very explicit that when you store a customer/users data, that you have a reason to do so. If that customer/user wants it gone, then you better have a process to do so, or reason to keep it beyond "Well this doesn't work without it" otherwise the EU will get grouchy as hell about it.
If any of that data CAN correlate back to a user, then Reddit does have a requirement to remove it from the public eye if the user has requested to do so (i.e. via a deletion request).
I work in Data, GDPR scares the bastard out of companies still.
We ran into this in my previous company with reviews
My understanding is that the review was allowed to stay, but the date of stay, the username ETC and anything that would look back to the customer just remain?
It was one of the reasons I deleted comments myself before requesting the account be deleted on Reddit
So, your company probably had to do some sensible QA checking that reviews weren't hostile or broke GDPR as well. I.e. they didn't have "Mr Dave Smith of 123 Fake Street is an arsehole" in them.
In this instance, Reddit can get a kick-in if it doesn't do that itself potentially. Depends on how hard the EU want to knock big-tech about.
Which lately... is quite a lot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm quite sure the public eye has nothing to do with it. If they store it (or do any other operation on it), GDPR concerns it. It doesn't have to be public for GDPR to be in effect.
The data collected MUST be a viable reason to store it.
If you've got data in freetext that is "Dave Matthews, 123 Fake street, Fakestone" then they technically have an obligation to remove it, they do not have authority to host said data from the owner... Or they cannot verify it.
That’s accurate. To circumvent this, you have to first edit each comment and replace it (with a space or something like “this comment was deleted by the user”). There were plugins for this; I don’t know if they still work.
Four of my comments were "restored". But I can imagine that the subreddits were already in private when I ran the mass deleter. All the other comments are still gone.
If someone wants to mass delete their posts, I used https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit/ successfully.
Unfortunately, you can't replace the comments with praises for /u/spez and they will be rewritten to Lorem Ipsum before deletion.
I personally use Power Delete Suite, a bookmarklet which does allow you to replace your comments with "praises for spez" before deletion or simply edit them all without deletion.
I used one of those on an old account years ago and it just missed a huge amount of my comments. You could log into my account one day and see nothing, and then a month later there would be more comments.
It wasn't un deleting them or something, because you could also find these comments with a google search, its just something about how Reddit works that it didn't bring up these comments on my user page right away.
This means that any script meant to delete or edit all of your comments is likely going to run into the same issue, even if there was no blackout.
I didn't delete yet, I simply edited all to show [deleted]. Saw a few others doing that. The edits are in place. My plan was to leave as that text for a few days to let caching, backups and archives catch that. Then in a few days delete.
Oh, that's supremely fucked! I thought the consensus was they didn't have this capacity? Are they rolling back to previous data points?
The general advice I had seen was edit then delete. I’m not sure if even that is 100%, but it does make more sense. I don’t think Reddit has put in the engineering to properly version comments.
Mine still seems to be gone, though curiously a few are still searchable through Google (Google must have cached them?). Perhaps its worth investigating this fully before drawing the pitchforks out again.
Google definitely caches them to some extent, I had several instances during the blackout where I googled something, got a relevant reddit thread among my top results, and then upon clicking through the sub was private. I wager it's something similar here.
I personally experienced this. Many subreddits I was active in were not dark when I deleted comments and posts, but as of this morning all of my main account had its comments and posts restored, and my alt had everything ~5 years or older restored. Both with no communication to me.
So now, I have used the shreddit CLI app to delete all posts and comments for both accounts, and then deleted said accounts.
To me, it seems obvious that Reddit is, in fact, legally within their terms and conditions to do whatever they want with content I submitted. However, doing things like restoring explicitly deleted content may run them into trouble where someone was deleting something they may not have intended to be public, or no longer wanted to be public. Not everyone understands this stuff.
If anyone thinks that deleting comments will actually result in deleting comments, I got some bad news for you. If Reddit has been planning to start charging LLMs for access to its user comments, they would they would have stopped deleting comments from the database long ago. A flag would be implemented instead to mark a comment as "deleted", that's all. Everything you commented on in the past is still available to them, and to any LLM they want to sell it to. They just won't show it on the website.
If you want to fuck with Reddit management, just delete your account. A sudden and significant drop in registered users, especially ones that was several years old, is the only thing that will get their attention at this point.
It's not just LLM, but current best practices for database management, especially in a heavily cached database on a CDN, which reddit is, is to never delete any content but rather just flag it to not show. This prevents churn and database errors. Reddit has never, in the 10 or so years I've used it, permanently deleted comments.
However, I believe the other comments in this thread are correct that reddit does not version comments or store previous versions, so using a script to overwrite the contents of all comments prior to deletion should have the desired effect.
You would hope that. But if management thought that people would start editing their comments instead of just deleting them, a snapshot of the database taken just before the shit hit the fan would negate all of that. That's if they don't just store separate instances of each edit with a revision number that simply shows the last edit. There are any number of ways that this could be handled if the primary goal was to save all user comments, including a good number of examples of spelling or grammar errors with the corrections right beside it. Don't think that management hasn't thought of all this before they made the announcement.