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Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

kbin.social

161–170 of 579 posts

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#161
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.

It's also worth noting that reddit admins have maliciously modified comments in the past.

This one in particular, in fact - Steve Huffman, aka spez. Google "fuck spez" to see just how popular this guy is.

Same guy who un-personed Aaron Swartz, claiming he wasn't a cofounder after Swartz died, and removing him from Reddit's founder page.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#162
post #150
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.

Innocent until proven guilty can be a decent philosophy even outside the courtroom. Especially when tensions are high. Both sides giving the other the benefit of the doubt can help to deescalate. Unless the objective isn't to deescalate.

Well Reddit's objective certainly isn't to deescalate.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#163
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emotiona…

> As time has demonstrated dozens of times As time has demonstrated dozens of times, platforms, behaviors and manias come an go in regular (though not quite predictable) bursts. Betting that nothing ever changes is not consistent with the general arc of developments in the broader technology space. Actually the opposite is likely true. The digital landscape is very "disruptable" and relies on various dark patterns (o…

I mean if a group of people is constantly "predicting" that X will go down then some day indeed they'll be correct.

I'm not saying things don't change because it'd be dumb to believe that given known human history. However I just despise the fact that even here in HN, any event happening in corporate that's otherwise minor outside of these doors is confidently defined as the tipping point ("fastest suicide" is maybe one of the most dramatic ways) and the company will go bust. Just wanted to clarify that, I agree with your sentiment.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#164
post #57

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 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...

It's just a soft delete behind the scenes usually (a flag in a table as you say)

They usually store some history in a logging database that can be reverted at some point in time

Nothing is really truly hard deleted on the web most times

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#165
post #108
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the content - not many people out there are directly doxxing themselves but indirectly? Maybe. From my post history on Reddit, you'd know where I live, my age, gender, job, relationship status and a good amount about places I've been and my interests. There are already websites that collate that info from a profile to give a summary of the user. Under GDPR, that quite possibly adds up to personal data rela…

Yep I agree, if you posted on a specific subreddit this is already personal information about yourself. There is no way they are not violating GDPR if they deny a request to delete (but I guess they can block direct deletion in bad faith and tell you to submit a direct request).

I'm not saying the content of a post can not be personal data. I'm saying it is not by default.

The words "Hello world" posted on any subreddit is not personal data. In this case the company could simply delete the information relating to you such as user name, IP etc.

The content you post is not, in general, personal data. It certainly can be.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#166
post #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 emotiona…

We're more sensitive about Reddit becoming an unusable mess for people like us. I don't care what happens to Reddit anymore, I'm going to Lemmy because it's the experience I wanted when I joined Reddit 12 years ago.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#167
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The adage that “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” cuts both ways. Musk and Hoffman seem to be intent on waging war with their own product. They both get a lot of unpaid labour producing their content and then complain that the unpaid labour isn’t paying for the privilege.

Huffman (spez) has his reasons for the reddit changes, but they do seem a bit short-sighted. But there comes a point where these online services have to make money. It's as simple as that. So is he waging war on users, or making a business decision? Also, Musk is waging war against advertisers. Running a site that is controlled by advertisers is the epitome of extreme centralization, since the site's income can be ha…

> Musk is charging on Twitter so the users aren't the product.

I think the adage is a little wrong. In Twitter's case users are still part of the product as the existing network effects and ability to communicate with users are part of the product, and thus it's users are. Not to such a significant degree as when advertisers are sweeping up every bit of data about you, but still to some degree.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#168
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The point stands…more comments, more content, more value, higher exit price

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#169
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'…

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

No, you're thinking of the right to force the company to delete content that you yourself, and your interactions with their system (or the system's observations of you) were causal to generating within their systems.

For a clear example of the difference: I don't have the right under GDPR to tell Apple to reach into everyone else's iCloud address books to delete my phone number out of them. Neither I nor Apple put my phone number into other people's address books; those other people manually entered that info into their address books themselves. Which makes that their data, that they created — which just happens to reference me (and which is held in trust by a third party.)

If GDPR worked the way you're imagining, then someone deleting their WhatsApp account would require WhatsApp to tell my phone to delete my locally-saved WhatsApp chat-logs of conversations with that person.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#170
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 am not commenting on whether this is a good thing or not, from my POV that's for each person to decide themselves. However, if this catches on and becomes more prevalent (and I could see that happening), then I'd expect some kind of cyber-vandalism law to be enacted. They can't prosecute based on hacking, because it isn't. But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property by editing to add conten…

> But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property

But it's your comment. While I'm sure there's legalese in the T's & C's that you hand over all rights to your comment over to Reddit or release it under a permissive license, that doesn't make it right or just.

And I think reddit and other communities rely on keeping up the appearance that they respect you and your works, even if they're just shitpost comments.

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