Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

kbin.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 579 posts

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#211

Post by didntcheck »

veave wrote: post #183
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?

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

Which is itself a problem IMO. Discord is the same, but at least they have a tiny excuse (being very charitable here) in that they'd have to add a new UI view for that, but Reddit already has the profile view where a user should be able to see all the comments they've made

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#212

Post by rodw »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #155
rodw wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was more or less my working theory. It's not _all_ of my comments that have been restored, it's only my comments going back to 2020 (and I can't be sure that _all_ of the comments in that time range were restored either, but it looks pretty thorough).

I wouldn't put it past Reddit to restore old comments given sufficient motivation, I just have a hard time imaging how the cost/benefit analysis would say that this is a good idea at this specific point in time.

It seems plausible that with all the other churn going on at Reddit - and as others have noted a large number of people deleting comments and accounts and maybe subs - that they accidentally restored some data-store to the wrong snapshot or something.

I just don't understand how the difference between "we HAVE N million comments" and "N million comments HAVE BEEN posted" in some investment deck could be worth the risk to reputation and good will, not to mention potential GDPR violations or bad press from doxing stalking victims or whatever.

Someone else mentioned SEO as a possible motivation. I might buy that. If Reddit is losing PV and DAU and restoring a bunch of old content would offset some of that with organic search traffic, that seems like something they might do.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#213

Post by asylteltine »

randomdata wrote: post #200
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. If it's alright to ask, why do you have this policy? In my case I never delete my posts/comments and always edit with a big "EDIT" disclosure.

A comment’s value rarely outlasts more than 24 hours, if that. Why hoard data?

That’s not true at all. Most of the random helpful searches I have done dig up comments that are months or years old.

It’s basically like making a post asking a really obscure question and then just writing nvm figured it out.

At the same time, I want Reddit to fail

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#214

Post by e12e »

293984j29384 wrote: post #22

I can confirm a comment I made in r/vmware has been restored. I typically delete my comments after 24 hours. I have a single comment from 20 days ago that was previously deleted now back on my profile.

This will be interesting if reddit conducts business (sells ads) in the EU. Hard to see how having such old backups of user content isn't in violation of the GDPR.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#215

Post by brucethemoose2 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #170
Communitivity wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shit…

They are not your comments. They are Reddit's.

And TBH the perception of owning your comments doesn't really matter in the short term... people don't care, they just want to post.

In the long term the actual content creators won't like it, but that is a problem for another owner.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#216

Post by chaosjevil »

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…

That reasoning is similar to the one that I've found in r/RedditAlternatives: they're proposing to replace the content with random crap from a conlang generator.

EDIT: found the pic https://i.imgur.com/45M3a8c.png

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#217

Post by derwiki »

eek2121 wrote: post #134
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?

Use GDPR. Even if you aren't in the EU.

CCPA for some of us, and refer to the CA AG if the business does not adequately comply

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#218

Post by derwiki »

wongarsu wrote: post #198
m-p-3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that is GDPR-compliant.

You could argue that it's not the comments themselves that are personally identifiable, but the association between comment and username (and IP etc). Following that argument, you could retain the comments as long as you delete the username and other identifying info. Not sure if that would hold up, as some comments can be pretty identifying. But it's a compromise that a company could try.

Is GDPR only for PII? My understanding was that it applied to your data, regardless of PII status

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#219

Post by qzx_pierri »

littlestymaar wrote: post #203
qzx_pierri wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit

reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month[5], with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted. reddit is ranked #18 globally.

4chan has 51 million visits per month[4], has very little persistent storage (posts are deleted once the thread slides to the bottom of the board list), and strict size limits for the posts that exist at any given time. 4chan is ranked #708 globally.

Wikipedia does get 4.7 billion monthly visits[3], but they do have a public list of large donors[1], and the entire wikipedia catalog can fit onto a 20gb microSD card [2]

So I can't give a solid answer, but it seems like the other 2 sites you mentioned have a slightly better design when it comes to infra costs.

1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/don...

2: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

3: https://www.similarweb.com/website/wikipedia.org/#overview

4: https://www.similarweb.com/website/4chan.org/#overview

5: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#220

Post by DismantleMars »

zoky wrote: post #149
username332211 wrote: post #104

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…

I think the lack of activity since the conspiracy theory started could be easily explained by the user being creeped out by the witch hunt and abandoning their account. I know if I was accused of secretly being a hated figure like Maxwell on an account that wasn't connected my real identity, I wouldn't come out and deny it, I'd just ditch my account and make a new one.

It also seems unlikely to me that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell would have the time to be such a prolific Reddit user, and that she would write like a Redditor - for example calling someone "butt-hurt" in one comment.

Post reply on HN