Live data from Hacker News

Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

kbin.social

151–160 of 579 posts

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#151
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m astounded and confused that you and a lot of other commenters are giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt. At a time when tensions between Reddit management and its users are at an all-time high, and both sides are maliciously striking back and forth, most commenters are assuming that an act like this is due to incompetence rather than malice? I don’t understand the thought process.

Because there's no apparent benefit to reddit to bring back long deleted comments from arbitrary users. When you can think of no motive for malicious behavior, it is unparsimonious to assume malicious behavior.

Of course there is a benefit. If users leave and remove their comments in protest, the data content available on Reddit is lowered, thereby lowering one of the IPO metrics. By un-deleting comments, the site's message count and user activity goes up, and thereby its IPO value.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#152

Hanlon's razor. Anyone who has used Reddit for any period of time (or basically any similar site, which includes FB, Twitter, and even HN), has seen data consistency issues during high load (like periods of activism). Shards die or fall out of quorum, work queues get purged, etc. That's the reality of systems with a lot of very low value data. Eventually consistent, but also perpetually inconsistent.

Data consistency on comments n years old?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#153
post #50
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…

That is what this extension does: https://github.com/sr33/ares It hasn't been maintained in a while, but I can confirm that it still works. EDIT: Here is another alternative. I haven't used this one myself but it seems legit: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

I also recently made a browser extension because those two tools are outdated / hard to use: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...

Let me know if you try it! Still developing and would love feedback.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#154
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m astounded and confused that you and a lot of other commenters are giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt. At a time when tensions between Reddit management and its users are at an all-time high, and both sides are maliciously striking back and forth, most commenters are assuming that an act like this is due to incompetence rather than malice? I don’t understand the thought process.

Because there's no apparent benefit to reddit to bring back long deleted comments from arbitrary users. When you can think of no motive for malicious behavior, it is unparsimonious to assume malicious behavior.

There’s a huge incentive for Reddit to retain the comments - that’s their knowledge base. Without that a lot of their value is gone.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#155
post #113
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?

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 def…

So it looks more like a database restore of some data. I'm inclined to think it was a rollback of some sort - to fix something that needed more QA time.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#156
post #118
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that is GDPR-compliant.

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

If reddit employees want to travel to europe then a way to enforce it can be found

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#157
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's no apparent benefit to reddit to bring back long deleted comments from arbitrary users. When you can think of no motive for malicious behavior, it is unparsimonious to assume malicious behavior.

Of course there is a benefit. If users leave and remove their comments in protest, the data content available on Reddit is lowered, thereby lowering one of the IPO metrics. By un-deleting comments, the site's message count and user activity goes up, and thereby its IPO value.

But that's not what's happening (only those protesting having their comments restored).

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#158
post #69
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. See https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re... Only if your personal posts are important for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific research, historical research or statistical purposes where erasure is likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of that processing.

No, you are confusing, say, a post, with its content. The content of a post does (in general) not relate to an identifiable person.

This may legally be the case, but it is worth noting that there are various tools out there to try and find posts written by the same person under different names. They use word frequencies, I think.

So, this seems like a case of the law not 100% matching reality. Sometimes the EU adjusts their laws to keep up with reality, I think? (The idea of trying to make sensible laws is pretty foreign to me, but then I’m an American.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#159
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's no apparent benefit to reddit to bring back long deleted comments from arbitrary users. When you can think of no motive for malicious behavior, it is unparsimonious to assume malicious behavior.

Of course there is a benefit. If users leave and remove their comments in protest, the data content available on Reddit is lowered, thereby lowering one of the IPO metrics. By un-deleting comments, the site's message count and user activity goes up, and thereby its IPO value.

It's probably more about search engine results than the appearance of user account.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's no apparent benefit to reddit to bring back long deleted comments from arbitrary users. When you can think of no motive for malicious behavior, it is unparsimonious to assume malicious behavior.

There’s a huge incentive for Reddit to retain the comments - that’s their knowledge base. Without that a lot of their value is gone.

Retain is not equivalent to undelete (making visible to everyone).
Post reply on HN