Reddit won't allow me to delete my comments
I have, despite my better judgement, gone back on reddit in a limited way after exiting completely for a few months. I decided to anonymize myself as much as possible and was using Redact to cover my history. It overwrites comments with random words plus a short message that the comment has been anonymized and deleted with Redact. It's been working great for quite a few months.
Today I logged on for the first time in a few days and my comments have ALL been restored, right back to when I opened a new account a few months ago after closing my ten year old account. Everything is there again.
Not sure reddit's point in restoring them, other than a stark reminder that comments and personal info mining is the point of reddit, not community engagement, just like all the other social media.
Curious if anyone has any idea on how to permanently delete comment history?
If you happen to live in the EU you can request via the GDPR deletion of your personal data.
Otherwise, it’s not possible. Golden rule of prod data is to tombstone, never delete.
Can I ask about tombstone? From what I gathered, from the perspective of Reddit and most places that deal with data, the golden rule is not to delete records outright. Rather, move the content to be deleted to a kind of tomb for a bit, just in case?
In this particular case, of course it's not in Reddit's interest to have money making and AI feeding human content destroyed, so they pushed it into a data tomb somewhere. Then, maybe they're looking at things that look Redact'd, since the replacement text has the software name on them, and just roll them all back to the "stable" version just before the replacement. I wonder what their justification is to edit a user's comments, that Redact is against policy blah blah, or plain Reddit has every right shove off.
Tombstoning is the idea that instead of just deleting a record, you instead mark that record with an
isDeleted: trueflag. This is used in various different situations with different goals - in certain data structures, for example, a "true" deletion would be a costly O(n) operation (or worse), but setting the tombstone flag is O(1). In databases, being able to set a record as deleted without deleting the underlying data protected you from various issues - a user accidentally deleting data and then calling the helpline in a panic, or a bug that triggers deletions unexpectedly.In this case, Reddit has historically taken the second approach - only soft-deleting data to allow for better recovery or making it easier to fix issues. That isn't necessarily user-hostile in general (it can make things quite user-friendly if they want to revert a deletion), but it does look like they're currently using this approach in a user-hostile fashion.
That makes a lot more sense, thank you. I haven't really given data structures behind sites like this one and Reddit a lot of thought. Having a flag rather than actually changing the data content makes way more sense, especially also in light of what @astroget said about law enforcement etc.
In OP's case that's even easier for Reddit to batch unflag the tombstoned comments. (Ahh, hence tombstone: it's just a grave marker, regardless of where the actual dead text resides)
This is possible but not trivial.
"Rolling back" implies there's something to roll back too, and usually an edit just overwrites the data because storing not just every comment ever made, but every single change made to every comment, is extremely expensive. Further there's almost no use case for the user or the company, as rolling back an edit is a feature someone normally needs.
Granted, if someone asked me to do that for reddit, I'd probably have some heuristics and short term storage of recent edits. Look for anyone who's just had mass edits in a short timeframe across multiple posts, or edits that have significant diff's between the original and new content, then long term store the ones that flag, and iterate from there.
That's probably doable, and probably a bad way to do it because i'm a rank amateur at this shit, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have some procedure for it. Still I wouldn't be totally surprised if they just don't bother since they just send X data every day/week and so by the time you've nuked your history it's already sent to all the relevant parties.
There are good reasons you would want not only edits, but also edit time and history. If I post a death threat and then edit the post the police would still like to know who made it (and at what time from where). But if the threat comes in an edit, you still need the information, just from the editee. Same if you need to prove how long information was visible before you took action or any number of other reasons
And realitically reddits cost is serving the page, far more than storing the comments. And the value is all about the data they have on their users. So to me it seems short sighted to not store an edit history, as well as deleted commnets. It's not data you normalt serve so it's easy to just store for 24 hours and then push to some cheap bucket and it could potentially be valuable.
This used to be explicitly not the case for edits to reddit comments, hence overwriting the comment with junk instead of deleting it outright. Apparently that has changed at some point.
a few US states may have similar forms too. California has the CCPA which acts similarly to the GDPR.
My own post from June 2023: https://tildes.net/~tech/16on/reddit_technical_issues_seem_to_be_leading_to_comments_still_being_visible_on_the_site_that_users
tl;dr: it's a caching issue, you might have to edit/delete your posts a few times before they're gone for good. But even then, you won't be able to access your oldest posts from your profile page.
Deimos’s post suggests it’s technical glitches so perhaps it can still be done with some persistence.
Although note that they will be included in a data export, which you can then use to edit or delete them. The turnaround time is appalling (but, like, weeks, not months or years), but I did this when I nuked my account, and from pretty extensive spot-checking, everything (going back… uh… let's just say "an embarrassingly long time") has remained nuked.
I believe when I asked for records, they said they’re only legally obliged to respond within 30 days, so naturally it took at least 28 days to send a file that probably took their server half a second to generate and send to me...
Good to know, thanks!
There are some good suggestions here, but from what I understand the key to mass-deleting posts is to use a bot or script that abides by Reddit's rate-limit requirements. I see people deleting their posts all the time, but there are only certain utilities (i.e. bots or scripts) that work.
It's trivial to go back and remove content from a post and have it stick. But going back and editing multiple posts rapidly, especially if a link is involved, will trigger at least 2 anti-bot filters.
One mechanism, which I'm assuming is either based on API limits or is otherwise meant to be anti-vandalism/anti-mass-edit, prevents a single account from doing anything that a human shouldn't be able to do that fast. So some of the bots/scripts run into that real fast and Reddit's system just never lets those changes propagate.
The other is probably an old mechanism to prevent scammers from making a text-only post and then going back 30-90 seconds later and editing in rule-breaking links. Those posts used to be a huge problem several years ago. It's not clear to users of the bots, but some of them dump random text as well as a "deleted by XYZ bot <link>" and that will be caught by filters. Some subreddits now have AutoMod rules specifically to catch these posts edited months or years after their original creation. Previously, AutoMod used to not be able to action comments after a certain amount of time.
That’s terrible. It sounds like you edited them and didn’t delete them? From a technical point of view, there’s no way to stop Reddit from keeping a history, but you could try deleting.
Are they still editable?
Looks like it, yes.
I used PowerDeleteSuite last year to scrub my account. I think it took 5 tries to get all of the comments because of the caching issue, but it makes it a lot easier to get them all.
I use the following tool: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/announcing-shreddit-overwrite-and-delete-your-reddit-history/88412
I had to grab my full history via GDPR request (which can take a bit of time to get returned to you) and then had the tool delete all my history. If you don't do this it will only delete roughly the last 1000 comments you made.
Due to rate limiting I think I had to run the tool 2x to get everything fully removed.
After that I have it setup on my linux machine with a cronjob to delete any comments on reddit after 45 days, I figure 45 days is long enough to have a useful conversation but doesn't have the long term impact of being training or revenue generation tools for reddit.
That said my reddit usage has gone WAY down in recent months.