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Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

kbin.social

181–190 of 579 posts

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Strong incentive also exists to undelete.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#182
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…

WhatsApp is fundamentally different from Reddit. WA matters if the people you want are on that platform or a different one. Reddit has a network-effect but you care less about specific people and more about content/discussion. If my brother in law is on WA then I might have to be on WA, Reddit is much more fluid. If somewhere pops up with enough content/participation then I'm good to move.

The other major difference is content. On WA you only care about the content your direct friends/family create, on Reddit the masses are dependent on a few to submit comment (and even comment, there are a ton of lurkers who never comment, might not even up/down vote). If WA content goes to shit you can tell your BIL to stop sending you crap, if Reddit content goes to shit (due to loss of power users or moderation) it's a much harder problem to solve.

The WA exodus always struck me as way too difficult, getting friends/family to switch messaging platforms is super hard. Reddit? Might be unlikely but I was in the Digg->Reddit migration and I'm 100% looking for where I want to move now that Reddit is acting this way.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#183
post #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?

That's impossible. You can't see comments you made in private subs, therefore you couldn't have deleted them.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#184
Isn't this potentially a safety risk? Some people have deleted comments due to accidentally posting personal information and some people are also genuinely at risk from real-world harassers and stalkers.

Having said that - people are scraping and archiving Reddit all the time for both good and not so good purposes - so maybe it's not a big deal?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It is in this case. They don't "need" the data themselves, they need Googlebot to see it to get traffic, which is their lifeblood both in general and for IPO.

Have you heard the recent popular saying that Googling things barely even works anymore unless you append reddit to the query, which tends to bring up actual information instead of SEO trash?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#186
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.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Arguably the perception of the size of their knowledgebase is more important than the actual size, at least when talking about the upcoming IPO.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#188
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't read too much into it. It's not like the reddit community wasn't prone to paranoid suppositions. Just ask that moderator accused of being Ghislaine Maxwell.

Yeah, so, at first I scoffed at the notion as well, but I kept following up on it, and… are we really so sure that it wasn’t Ghislaine Maxwell? I kept looking for them to post something, anything… but nothing. https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/ All it would have taken is a single post to prove that it really wasn’t her, but no. Radio silence. For over three years. It’s not like somebody is protesting being defa…

Seconded.

Sounds crazy, but the more you look into it [0]... And don't forget the blackmail! You know, which Huffman projected onto Apollo's developer, even after being proved a liar by Christian's recordings.

This is actually quite important, because Huffman and 'maxwellhill' go way, way back.

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_...

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#189
post #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?

I've been using Shreddit for years, and thus far, all my deleted comments and posts have not shown back up.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#190

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.

Its not a shock to anyone who knows how cheap data is, but it just proves there is no true 'delete'. I never deleted my facebook profile/pictures because I didn't want to shine a spotlight on my account. I care more about what a 'deleted' post says, than any other post in a thread. I imagine there is a good reason for that.

Same here. I also thought if I deleted my FB account, they would just maintain a “shadow profile” for me.
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