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Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

kbin.social

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Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#31
post #2

Clicking on the title of the kbin post takes you here where there are more comments: https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144 This seems like such an unwise thing for them to do that I feel like there must be another explanation.

> another explanation

Could be an intentional small-scale data rollback that has accidentally had far wider effect. Or some “eventually consistent” anomaly where nodes that never saw the changes/deletes have reasserted the version of reality they still see.

But back to the previous hand…

> seems like such an unwise thing for them to do

Doing unwise things then doubling down on them seems to be Reddit's MO at the moment, and that has been the case for a while so each re-doubling currently means a notable jump in unwiseness, so I'm not surprised enough by any given apparent iffy decision that I reach for other explanations by default.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#32
post #6

Where does the idea come from that not allowing users to delete content is against the law/GPDR? You have the right to ask for deletion of personal information they store, and even that has certain limits. You don't have the right to force the company to delete content unless they granted you that right via the licence somehow. Whether this is a good or bad idea for a company to do is a different question. But I don'…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#33
post #6

Where does the idea come from that not allowing users to delete content is against the law/GPDR? You have the right to ask for deletion of personal information they store, and even that has certain limits. You don't have the right to force the company to delete content unless they granted you that right via the licence somehow. Whether this is a good or bad idea for a company to do is a different question. But I don'…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#34

There has been a constant stream of negative top HN posts about Reddit for a few weeks now, even if they often get manually pushed down from the front page. Was there ever a comparable shitstorm on HN against a big corp? Will this go down as the fastest suicide of a social media company?

I don't think Reddit will die because of this nor I think this is the first time HN gets sensitive against a corporation's actions. It's happened several times in the past. The most recent I remember is the beef with Meta and WhatsApp, where a good chunk of HN was very sure everybody would move over to Signal and WhatsApp would be left to rot. Similar thing happened with Twitter and Mastodon. People get very emotional and cannot see through the fog.

It's just the same cycle over and over. As time has demonstrated dozens of times, HN isn't good at forecasting nor is representative at all of most end-users. The great majority of Reddit users (and this doesn't include me) use the official app or the official website and therefore besides this very short protest which will end soon as like many other protests in the past for different reasons, Reddit will just continue to be as popular.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#35
post #20
post #3

This is crazy! I like the following comment on kbin: > I said it before and I say it again: if you have the patience to do so then make sure you overwrite your content with chatgpt generated content, as the future AI that will feed on your post HATE feeding on already AI generated stuff. It makes the AI diverge. People should not be deleting their posts but actually just replacing them with random AI generated conten…

I've actually been thinking about building this sort of thing as a Chrome extension, a generic comment/tweet deleting app. More for privacy reasons than protest ones. The web based services that do this via APIs never seem to stick around long which is why a browser extension makes more sense IMO. The AI thing is clever.

And it will be really hard to look at the database entries that all changed in bulk to distinguish them from legit entries. /s

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#36

I really think they are just misunderstanding something. When I look at my profile, there's no comments, but I know there should be some. Isn't it more likely that when a subreddit you posted in goes private, the comments don't show up. The people in the linked thread ran the delete script after some subreddits went private. Now when some are made public again, so are their comments. Comments that were never deleted…

Yeah, the mention of June 14th suggests the same to me. I can attest that comments from private subreddits don't show up on your own profile. The deletion script won't be able to find them nor delete them.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#37

I really think they are just misunderstanding something. When I look at my profile, there's no comments, but I know there should be some. Isn't it more likely that when a subreddit you posted in goes private, the comments don't show up. The people in the linked thread ran the delete script after some subreddits went private. Now when some are made public again, so are their comments. Comments that were never deleted…

I used Power Delete Suite to remove all comments from all public and private subs. They all came back today. So I re-deleted them again.

I suspect it's more likely the site didn't process the deletions properly, rather than maliciously bringing them back, or as you suggest, that they were private.

Edit: It's possible that the deletion only worked on public posts, after all, it seems?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#38
post #15

Every European Reddit user should put in a full GDPR data request.

And they will get a reasonable answer that reddit doesn't store personal information beyond what it needs to operate.

It's technically impossible to identify correct personal information in users' posts.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#39
post #16
post #6

Where does the idea come from that not allowing users to delete content is against the law/GPDR? You have the right to ask for deletion of personal information they store, and even that has certain limits. You don't have the right to force the company to delete content unless they granted you that right via the licence somehow. Whether this is a good or bad idea for a company to do is a different question. But I don'…

What if that content includes personal data about me? My hopes, dreams, preferences, plans, goals and political opinions?

That’s an interesting question in principle (even if there are some clear legal directives). You can try to reconstruct a user profile even just from a list of commonly visited subreddits. It can help gauge age, location, personal interests and political convictions. And if you have access to the content of the messages, well, even doxing may be possible.
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