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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

#201

Post by brookst »

tremon wrote: post #151
hackinthebochs wrote: post #144

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.

Investors aren’t that dumb, and if they were, your theory would create liability for securities fraud.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#202

Post by dghughes »

nottorp wrote: post #57
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 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...

Hey so I guess this is an opportunity to overwrite past "deleted" comments. A second chance lol

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#203

Post by littlestymaar »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #147
moomin wrote: 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…

> But there comes a point where these online services have to make money.

Reddit is 18 old, and you're telling me that they are just thinking about making money now? How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit? And how is it a problem with their users and not their management?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#204

Post by didntcheck »

rodw wrote: post #113
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?

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…

Isn't the fact that they're able to restore deleted comments from that far back itself an indication of malice, or at least irresponsibility? I could understand if it was comments from the past month, but after 3 years I'd expect the only remnant to be on very old backups if at all. The fact that they're visible again adds a lot of weight to the common suspicion that they're just setting a delete bit and keeping them in the live database

I do seem to recall that their database schema is mostly a big unstructured key-value table, so it's possible that this is part of the explanation - and they've never cleaned up any garbage/orphans in at least 3 years?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#205

Post by ncallaway »

hajile wrote: post #171

Reddit's privacy policy here seems to be pretty clear [0] > Deleting Your Account > You may delete your account information at any time from the user preferences page. You can also submit a request to delete the personal information Reddit maintains about you by following the process described below this table. When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users and disassociated from conte…

This is slightly different than account deletions. They’re also restoring individually deleted comments.

I, for example, deleted every comment I ever posted on Reddit, but left my account itself in place. As of this morning, many of my comments appear to have been restored.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#206

Post by ohgodplsno »

Communitivity wrote: post #139
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…

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 by editing to add content that knowingly will mess with their algs.

It cannot. Source: Reddit's ToS and reality:

>d. User Content. Reddit user photos, text and videos ("User Content") are owned by the users and not by Reddit.

If I want to replace what I posted with seventy five consecutive poop emojis, I am fully in my right to. Coupled with the right to be forgotten and the illegality for reddit to prevent me from doing so, it serves as a perfect tool to poison LLMs.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#207

Post by xp84 »

derefr wrote: post #169
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, 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…

Okay, and what are Reddit comments besides UGC that users directly generated?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#208

Post by jarym »

Ah, maybe they finally see an impact on revenue! That was their last argument against changing course. Although if we accept they are restoring deleted comments then its not so much 'changing course' as it is 'doubling down'. I wonder if the Reddit management even know the difference?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#209

Post by ScoobleDoodle »

cj wrote: post #150
lumb63 wrote: 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.

There are different thresholds in the legal system for criminal (beyond a reasonable doubt) versus civil (the preponderance of the evidence.) It already varies by venue and consequence. This is a social discussion. 4 year old comments being restored means Reddit is doing something to restore them now, which they didn’t do before.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#210

Post by jacksnipe »

llm_nerd wrote: post #12

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.

Unlike every other data operation, deletion is heavily regulated by law.
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