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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

#111

Post by chongli »

comboy wrote: post #82
nik736 wrote: 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…

They own deleted data too. If I would be selling this data I would just cleanup all edits and deletes starting from a few weeks ago to a time when the Internet gets bored with the drama. In modern chaotic world usually the best weapon against something you don't like is to just ignore it (there are exceptions of course).

Why not use a bot to automatically post brand new chatgpt-generated fake comments in between edits with fake stuff? Or automate making edits that insert/delete/replace one word with a random word?

There's many different things to do that could trash the data and make it worthless for training AI. With the right tools, this sort of automation can also be made very difficult to detect (randomize the time interval between edits and the time of day on which they occur [normally distributed during prime time]).

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#112

Post by TwoNineA »

ghglkl wrote: post #88

Am I the only one here who thinks it is actually quite reasonable to restore such comments? It's equivalent to a librarian restoring some of their books that have been vandalised by a disgruntled author.

>> It's equivalent to a librarian restoring some of their books that have been vandalised by a disgruntled author.

No, your analogy is idiotic.

Librarian had a sign up: Authors are allowed to vandalise their books. Then they restored it.

Every single reddit post has a "delete" link. If Reddit doesn't want people to delete their posts ... then I will go out on a limb and will suggest to ... remove the "delete" link?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#113

Post by rodw »

popey wrote: post #37
scandinavian wrote: post #23

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?

I've got a decade old account on which I've made a habit of manually deleting comments older than 6 - 9 months, since they get so little visibility and there's no value in leaving a breadcrumb trail.

Checking just now I see that comments up to 3 - 4 years old have been restored.

I'm not going to speculate as to why (beyond agreeing it's more likely to be incompetence than malice) but in my case at least there are definitely long deleted comments that have been restored.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#114

Post by smarx007 »

Pyramus wrote: post #59
Hendrikto wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have the right to force the company to delete content [relating to you] In the EU, you definitely do.

No, check GDPR Article 4 (1): personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable person. The content of a post is not personal data (in general) but the things like user name etc are. The content is not relating to an identifiable person (in general) while the user name is. Shakespeare's poems are not personal data.

No, personal data in GDPR is much wider than American PII definition.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#115

Post by unsupp0rted »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #96
popey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Reading about Power Delete Suite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite They don't mention being able to delete from private subs, and their method of deletion sounds like it would fail when the subs are set to private. I'll admit Reddit barely deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point, but I have no idea how you would delete posts on private subs except through some GDPR way that must exist.

If I comment in a sub that has since been set to private, can I not see my own comments on my own profile page? If so, do those comments not have an edit/delete button under them?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#116

Post by actionfromafar »

flushit wrote: post #35
dmix wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So make it work in the background then, registering on lots of sub-reddits and similar, and slowly shitpost in all of them.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#117

Post by telmo »

nashashmi wrote: post #53

The Reddit wars have begun. Users were misled to believe they have power. And now are completely bewildered when they realize they don’t have as much power as they thought. The funny thing is that this is all over a stupid API that was causing more harm to Reddit than it was functioning as a public service. Apps were functioning as alternatives to the Reddit website and app. The whole thing about API back in 2000s is…

> Users were misled to believe they have power. And now are completely bewildered when they realize they don’t have as much power as they thought.

First of all: if Reddit really is doing this, then it is committing an illegal act. At least in the EU, I'm sure in other jurisdictions also. There are in fact laws protecting the users. Second of all: Reddit cannot force users to post and moderate, and without those things there is no Reddit. Have you heard of Digg, by any chance?

> The funny thing is that this is all over a stupid API that was causing more harm to Reddit than it was functioning as a public service.

It was absolutely functioning as a public service, because third-party apps are the only ones that are actually usable. Especially so for moderator activities (that Reddit depends on to exist) and even more especially so for blind people, to whom Reddit official app does not cater.

Do you know what else functions as a public service? Unpaid moderators!

> The whole thing about API back in 2000s is it allows users to interface with Reddit programmably.

I remember those times very well, and that was not "the whole thing" at all, there was a "bait and switch" from independent forums to centralized services based on a promise of openness forever. But I digress. Who cares what the "whole thing was about back in 2000s"? It doesn't matter what it was about, the only thing that matters is what the situation is now, and the situation is that Reddit as we know it is an interdependent partnership between a company and an extensive international community. This is what survived to 2023 and this is what matters in 2023.

> Lesson: APIs are expensive to maintain and no real profitable business is going to keep them around unselfishly.

Another lesson: a profitable business cannot extract value from the unpaid work of enthusiasts while at the same time expecting to be able to treat said enthusiasts as valueless replaceable cogs.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#118

Post by ddalex »

m-p-3 wrote: post #70
nottorp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the delete function actually deletes anything. At best sets a flag. If i wrote public forum software, that's how I would do it and batch delete only comments that no one asked to undelete in at least a few months...

I doubt that is GDPR-compliant.

Does reddit have any kind of business presence in the EU ? How would the EU law be enforced?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#119

Post by ghglkl »

llm_nerd wrote: post #68
hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

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?

Worth noting that HN has become a Reddit-refugee outpost so this will probably continue if not get worse. See the other Reddit post (one about Reddit punting mods if they act against the interests of Reddit itself, which has always been true it's worth noting) with 100s of comments, folded into pages and pages of continuations. I mean does anyone honestly seriously believe Reddit purposefully undeleted this guy's com…

> Reddit suspends accounts en mass, and when they do they nuke their entire history of comments on the site.

That's not quite true, if an account is permanently suspended, the user page is unavailable for viewing, but the comments still remain in their respective threads.

It's only if an account is shadowbanned site-wide that all the comments are automatically removed too. This is intended only for spammer accounts, but can hit genuine users who are both newly created and end up being downvoted below a certain threshold.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#120

Post by veave »

smarx007 wrote: post #114
Pyramus wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, check GDPR Article 4 (1): personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable person. The content of a post is not personal data (in general) but the things like user name etc are. The content is not relating to an identifiable person (in general) while the user name is. Shakespeare's poems are not personal data.

No, personal data in GDPR is much wider than American PII definition.

Maybe so, but stuff you post on public forums is not PII, neither by the American nor the European definition.
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