Reddit technical issues seem to be leading to comments still being visible on the site that users assumed were deleted
Edit:
This might be a caching issue - Tildes mods have edited this post's title accordingly.
Anyway, this issue is concerning, as many people deleted their comments and accounts. Now the accounts are gone but the comments are back. Intentional or not, Reddit should fix this asap and communicate. This isn't acceptable.
Edit 2, 16 days after the original post:
For the 4th or 5th time, comments are popping back. Most of them in their original form, very few (2 out of 25) still edited as "[deleted]"
Original post:
(I know, more reddit stuff, sorry)
On June 16, four days after the beginning of the current Reddit protests, some users were reporting that their deleted comments were getting restored:
- https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144
- https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/34112/Heads-up-Reddit-is-quietly-restoring-deleted-AND-overwritten-posts-and
There were doubts if this was intentional or a bug caused by the blackout, or some rollbacks. Hanlon's razor, etc.
I then personally mass-edited my comments to "[removed]" two days ago, and lo & behold, they're getting edited back. And from what I've seen, there's definitely a pattern:
- All restored comments are at least 8-12 months old, so several pages deep in the comments history
- 90% of them are about programming, a few of them on my country's subreddit.
- (More than half of my comments are on gaming subreddits, they're still edited as "[removed]")
- The vast majority of them have responses
- (Though most of my comments also have responses)
- They're edited back in "small waves". 15-20 this morning, 4 this evening (so far).
I'm now editing them back twice, hoping that Reddit only keeps the previous version of a comment.
I find Reddit's behavior to be absolutely shameful. I've been on internet forums for nearly 25 years, and I've never seen a site unilaterally and silently decide to un-delete or (un-)edit comments. Never.
It feels like a golden rule of internet has been broken, and I'm surprised to not see more talks about it.
I'm not sure the right to be forgotten strictly applies. It only refers to your PII, and it isn't strictly clear that all your written comments apply. Some definitely do, but reddit could play dumb and ask you to point out in which of your comments you doxxed yourself. The easier method for them is probably to just comply, but I don't think that's their only path forward. However, you could even argue that replies that quote your posts apply as well, as long as they contain PII.
It's definitely the more painful route for reddit, and it also is the only easy way I can see to make the removal legally binding. If somehow your thus-deleted comments provably ended up in LLM training data after their deletion, reddit could be in deep shit.
Personally I think that depending on your jurisdiction, a copyright angle could be much stronger than a data protection angle.
Ok, I just did some research on the copyright angle, and as a german... holy shit, it's bad. It's so bad.
Sadly this argument doesn't work for anyone outside germany without adaptations, but:
German law has a provision for standard business terms [SBTs] (which reddit's user agreement unambiguously is). They must follow certain procedures in order to be valid. This is intended to rule out all the small print bullshittery. One particular provision is Section 307 of the civil code, which demands that SBTs must not unreasonably disadvantage the customer. Such an unreasonable disadvantage can arise from the provisions not being clear and comprehensible.
Let's see what reddit's SBTs are. When trying to create an account, reddit notifies me of their existence. Whether seeing a link implies effective incorporation of those terms (see section 305), I don't know. Let's follow the link. The website is in german for me, at this point, and now it leads me here: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement
There is so many things wrong with this site, I don't think this would at all qualify under german law.
In short: I don't think I've ever legally accepted reddit's terms, and if I have, I don't think the parts that give them a license to use my copyright-protected writings hold any water.
Of course: IANAL.
The cost of GDPR compliance is too high for them to really fight you in that situation. They'd probably fold once you bring up GDPR.
For context - I remember seeing a figure that every customer support contact you make costs a company ~$10. Scale that up for the salary of a compliance officer (vs minimum wage, offshored customer support).
Same reason why frivolous lawsuits work - it's just not worth the headache (and cost) to fight it.
Absolutely. I don't think they'd actually keep your content up, that's just too much hassle, considering you can get government agencies involved relatively effortlessly. I'm just not sure you legally have the rights that katana implies you do.
Interesting. Are you sure it's not some eventual consistency thing? Don't know how reddit stores its comments internally but I do wonder if it's a caching issue.
A caching issue between the 12th and the 16th, at the peak of the blackout, would have made sense. We're now the 20th, and it's still happening? For comments edited 2 days ago?
And like I said, comments are slowly getting restored, it looks like by subreddit. They're also all "valuable" (only programming-related, none about gaming so far), and relatively old. I had to scroll quite far to find them.
So it really feels intentional. And in any case, even if it was an unintentional issue, the fact that Reddit does not communicate about it is enough to be concerning.
I wiped my history before the blackout, so that isn't the issue with my account.
There's a few things that can be happening here. Firstly, you can't edit comments within a sub that you don't currently have access to, so any sub that was private at the time wouldn't have actually deleted your comments. If those subs are coming off of private then those comments would be restored.
Secondly, there's a rate limiting currently being enforced in the api calls from the scripts used to delete your history. I know some people were seeing that the comment was being wiped and deleted client side, but due to the rate limiting that wasn't actually being transmitted server side. I don't have all the details on that, I just remember hearing someone explaining that and could be an answer for some of those situations.
All my comments are (were) publicly accessible when I edited them
I'm using a userscript in the form of a bookmarklet ("Pkolyvas for of Power Delete Suite") that waits 5 seconds between each call. Once done, I refreshed to confirm my comments were gone.
And either they're gone or they're not. They're not supposed to pop back one by one nearly 2 days later.
It’s unlikely the caching would be causing problems for comments that are 8-12 months old. This is really odd if it’s a technical issue (maybe deimos can weigh in if this is possibly a technical issue), but it’s even more odd if it’s intentional, because why would they pick and choose?
Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn't the standard way you're thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of "cached" listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that's stored permanently and kept up to date individually.
For example, when you view your comments page, Reddit uses a cached (permanent) list of which comments are in that page. There is a separate list stored for each sorting method. For example, maybe you'd have something like this with some made-up comment IDs:
If I post a new comment, it will go through each list and add the new ID in the right spot (for example, in the "new" list it always just goes at the start). If I delete a comment, it goes through every list, and removes the ID if it can find it in there.
One of the problems with this system (which is probably what's causing @phedre's issues, and affecting many other people trying to delete their whole history) is that all of these listings are capped at 1000 items. If you already have more than 1000 comments and you post a new one, the 1000th comment currently in the new list gets "pushed off the end". The comment still exists, but you won't be able to see it by looking through your comments page, because it's no longer in that listing.
Deleting comments also doesn't cause previously "pushed off" ones to get re-added. If you have 5000 comments, your listing will only include 1000 of them. If you delete 50 of the ones in the listing, your listing now has 950 comments in it. If you delete all 1000 from the listing, your comments page will appear empty, but you actually still have 4000 comments that will be visible in the comments pages they were posted in.
And this is only one aspect of it. There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.
All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.
@0xSim you should probably read the above comment. Deimos was a backend developer at reddit for many years so has first hand knowledge of how the underlying architecture of reddit works, and experience in dealing with these (and similar) issues.
And since the mystery is almost certainly solved, and it's very likely not reddit intentionally restoring deleted comments, I think your title (and topic text) here is potentially very misleading. So do you mind if I edit the title to something like "Reddit caching issues leading to comments still being visible on the site that users assumed were deleted", or something to that effect? And if you could change the body of your text to be more accurate as well, and maybe even mention Deimos' comment, that would also be appreciated.
Go on 👍
I've edited the body to link to Deimos' comment
Thanks! Much appreciated. :)
Thanks! I knew the profile view was capped at 1000 comments but I didn’t realize 1) deleted comments count towards the cap and 2) I guess I kind of assumed the scripts people were using made people aware of this limitation and either worked around it or people would be aware….
If it’s entirely “I only deleted my most recent 1000 comments and now am stumbling across my own comments that are older than that” it all makes sense that this is still entirely confusion stemming from reddit’s endless technical debt and sometimes wacky programming.
I was hoping that's the case. I obviously don't have the insight into the Reddit backend that you do, but it seems like a tall ask to cobble together a process to surreptitiously and sporadically restore comments in a purposeful manner like folks are describing. Not that it isn't possible, but I lean towards not attributing to malice that which is adequately explained by decades-old spaghetti code and obsession with feature release over technical debt maintenance.
Just to add some context to this: it's been 16-17 days since I edited then deleted all of my comments, and 25 of them just reappeared today. It's the 4th or 5th time it has happened.
Some comments are 1 month old, some are 2 years old, and 2 of them are still edited as "[deleted]".
This would be my guess - I'm seeing extremely inconsistent behaviour when trying to search the site for comments by me. Changing the sort sometimes surfaces new stuff, sometimes not.
Edit: technical issue is my guess, to be specific. It's too sporadic and inconsistent to be malicious.
They want to cash in on all that sweet sweet AI API cash, can't do that if you delete all the training data.
I'm seeing comments restored to subs, but not visible on my profile.
Yeah, same here. Accessing the comments directly allows me to edit them, but they don't appear on my profile. This is after editing and deleting them all recently.
Anyone have recommendations on more permanent methods?
I wonder if not all comments appear on the profile page, for some reason. I periodically delete all my comments anyway so my profile is empty. Yet a Google search just now for my username revealed an 8-year-old comment that I would have deleted years ago from my profile, but is still there. Are these reappearing comments definitely being deleted from and then reappearing to the profile page?
The profile page only ever showed the most recent 1000 comments.
That's a good thought. I'm not sure why they wouldn't appear on the profile page. But I'm also not sure how to check for ones that don't show up?
this could potentially be simply I deleted the ones on my profile page and not all of them show up, instead of a nefarious plot.
Go to the new reddit homepage, the search bar at the top. Search author:username and you can see both posts and comments by that username.
https://rentry.co/unreddit
Do you have any more context about this script? My Python’s not so great, looks like it’s expecting the overwrite message to include
!#>for some reason? And it leaves 5 comments “just because”? Is that for some technical reason? Not sure why that would be baked into it.You are doing just fine, I glued it together for a single use a couple weeks ago and decided to publish. Let me boil it down as I know it's a mess.
There are two modes to it. If you request data from Reddit and run this script in the same folder as comments.csv, it will without asking just delete them all. I recommend this, as this is the only way I know that handles all comments. Everything else, including the other mode, is just dealing with what you could do by hand.
The other mode is for when you don't have the comments.csv. It takes your available comments (limited by Reddit and there's no bypassing it). It leaves 5 for no real reason—it's small enough one can edit/delete them manually, and at the same time prevent deleting the very most recent stuff one might've forgot to backup, nonsense like that. I went ahead and deleted that just now. (And clarified the instructions.)
The symbols are to detect already edited comments to not edit them again in case you run it more than once. Since these available comments are constantly rolling if you write new ones, it's a possibility.
Doesn't work - the comments and posts don't appear in your profile. You have to search reddit and find them, go into each thread, and do it manually.
Here's what I'm seeing:
Look at my user profile:
https://old.reddit.com/user/phedre
Completely empty.
And yet:
https://old.reddit.com/r/muacjdiscussion/comments/gj9bqv/best_and_worst_makeup_packaging/fqjp8kt/?context=3
https://old.reddit.com/r/BeautyGuruChatter/comments/hoxu1t/comment/fxpcbyf/
Neither community was private when I deleted my history.
I don't think this is malicious, I think it's the result of data inconsistency/spaghetti code.
I agree. You probably remember using old modmail, where messages would start to disappear the further you went back. After 2-3 years, they became extremely sporadic.
Reddit has data integrity issues with older content. I'm not too surprised to see the same is true of comments on a userpage.
The scripts I know of (e.g.: powerdeletesuite) all rely on the comments being accessible from your profile to action them - not having them show up there effectively makes it impossible to use those scripts. Unless you know of one I'm missing?
Not brash, no, I'm just hyper focused on the issue of how to delete old content given the current site behaviour.
Not sure if this would prove anything one way or the other - I can search via reddit's ui or google and find comments I've deleted still on the site that aren't on my profile. I doubt any of this is intentional on reddit's side, the behaviour is far too inconsistent and sporadic to be anything but glitchy code.
Ah gotcha - that's my disconnect here.
I don't know that there's any way to really answer the questions you pose here - I doubt reddit themselves know the answer.
I have only deleted Reddit comments from the Reddit app in my phone. It only shows comments up to 2 months old. Once I delete all of the comments from my profile, they don't add older comments. Is it different when you access Old Reddit.on a computer or when you delete using Power Delete Suite?
I can definitely access older content via the old UI on desktop. I've never really used the official app, though now you have me curious if apollo will display anything I've deleted - checking that now.
Edit: it doesn't seem to be showing anything.
I just now deleted all of my comments using Power Delete Suite while accessing Old Reddit on my Chromebook. On the official app, it only showed three comments, all from the past week or so. I was able.to delete.almost a thousand comments using PDS. BTW, I had never used Old Reddit before - it's soooo much better than the app. I hope.it survives.
I appreciate where you’re coming from with this, but at the scale required for LLM training, one user’s (or a few hundred users’) sabotaged comments would have a negligible impact on the final result. You would have to scramble a much more significant portion of the corpus to notice any effect.
to be fair, there were glitches in GPT that were almost definitely due to certain prolific redditors in the training data
I got a message back from /r/askreddit after using a script to overwrite my comments asking me to stop spamming them with it.
My exact thought. So I ran the script again to delete everything after overwriting with gibberish. Got another automated message.
This is interesting- I attempted to manually edit my comments on one sub and got a message that I was banned. I never attempted to go back in and edit another comment (or post a comment) to test.out the ban. Only one sub banned me for this, btw. ETA: I deleted all of my comments using Power Delete Suite, including from the sub I was banned from, so the banning did not prevent that.
They sey up alerts on edits, yeah. r/funny has that too.
FWIW I just checked some of my informative posts that had a little bit of traction, they are still deleted. I ran the power suite delete tool a few weeks ago.
There’s always the megathread ;)
Did you wipe your history after subreddits started to go private? If a subreddit that you've posted/commented in goes private and you aren't an approved user your interactions in that subreddit will not appear in your history and you can't delete them. Is it possible you had posts/comments in private subs and after they unprivated you started seeing them again?
I did the wipe ~48h ago. All the comments I edited back since 8h ago were publicly accessible.
Everyone should see Deimos' comment: https://tildes.net/~tech/16on/reddit_is_silently_restoring_deleted_edited_comments#comment-8o2b
Reiterating my recent post about this topic: https://tildes.net/~tech/16fd/reddit_users_who_tried_to_delete_all_their_posts_during_the_blackout_inadvertently_left_behind#comment-8hcv
seven of my comments are back. All from the same subreddit /r/electronics.
In my case I would still argue that this subreddit was set to private when I had mass deleted my posts.
Although I'm not sure. Actually, my gut feeling tells me otherwise. It feels like I have seen those posts before I have mass-deleted them.
The four comments mentioned in my other post were not revived back.
Odd. Time to run the mass remover again. :)
Yup - I just had this happen on r/aww. Sorry their automod caught the edits, but I'm not going to stop it just because the bot gets pissy.
And I feel the same way about bans - doesn't bother me one bit.
Apparently, it's not just caching. Reddit really is restoring people's content and refusing to comply with the law. Louis Rossman goes over proof here. This is going to get reddit sued by the EU and California, and that's it for the IPO, and soon after for reddit itself. I'd say the protests worked wonderfully, just not quite as everyone expected. No one planned on spez being this stupid.
Yes I've seen this one yesterday. Personally it took me 3 or 4 rounds of mass-edit then mass-delete to get rid of all my comments. I'm still not 100% convinced it's a cache issue, and even if it is, a) it's really convenient for reddit and b) it's IMO a breaking bug that is incredibly being ignored by them, and downplayed by users.
Ugh, that was a very disappointing (but worthwhile) video. Do we know if Power Delete Suite will still work after June 30? Or Old Reddit? I ask because it looks like people will have to keep deleting their reappearing comments.
PDS is a user script that is directly executed on the web interface. There's no api call at all, though I don't know if it works with the new interface
Confirmed. They did this to me. I deleted my comments and posts, confirmed they were gone, deleted my account, and poof, they came back.
I saw this happen to a post referenced by The Museum of Reddit (Husband Makes List of All the Times OP Refused Sex with Him), but that was months ago.
When a company destroys trust like this, it's easy to believe every subsequent negative thing we experience is an intentional malicious action even when it's truly not. Seems like a type of (understandable) confirmation bias but one we should be vigilant about avoiding if we can, IMHO. I'm also talking to myself here, I find that I often quickly believe things like this and only after a bit of reflection and information do I step back and re-assess
Definitely seems to be a technical issue. My deleted comments remain deleted. I likely had less than the 1000 listing cap total in either of my accounts so it makes sense that I don't have old and extensive enough comment histories to encounter the issue where a profile listing doesn't have the comment cached anymore while the comments still exist in their respective subs. It does point to Reddit's underlying system apparently being awful, but not maliciously so.
I've edited the OP to note it might be a caching issue. However, even if not intentional, this is IMO a breaking bug that we should not minimize.
This thread has prompted me to start deleting my posts... fortunately, despite over 10 years, I don't have THAT many, I can just chill and manually delete them... slowly... over a few days.
I'm seeing similar things on my account as well.
See Deimos' reply here:
https://tildes.net/~tech/16on/reddit_is_silently_restoring_deleted_edited_comments#comment-8o2b
Reddit is almost certainly not intentionally restoring comments, and this is likely all due to caching issues.
Maybe Reddit is slowly pulling this historic content out of redshift (or one of those other reddit archive sites)