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

231–240 of 579 posts

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#231

Post by Karawebnetwork »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #172
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.

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.

I do the same. In my case, it's doxxing prevention. I don't like that someone can put my profile on one of the reddit inspector sites and get a detailed profile of me, including my age, where I live and my hobbies. I also don't like it when people can click on my name and get my entire history across all subreddits.

That's not the case here because I consider HN to be the equivalent of a single Subreddit, so the information is less diverse. I don't talk about every facet of my life here.

On the other hand, I'm the kind of person who uses a different username on every forum. It's a habit I picked up in the early days of the internet.

This is especially useful in this era where even news organization websites will quote your online username to add to their stories.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#232

Post by rodw »

didntcheck wrote: post #204
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…

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…

> 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?

Meh. You're not exactly wrong but I think it's pretty common for user-generated content sites to follow a logical delete strategy. It holds open the door to being able to restore data deleted by end-user error, and within the bounds of their data retention policy keeps data around that may be useful for internal analysis.

Actually come to think of it seems plausible that they only have ~3 years of logically deleted data, having purged deleted records older than that.

It's also plausible they had all the is-logically-deleted information in some redis datastore that wasn't being reliably persisted to disk and the process had to be restarted for the first time 3 years.

I'm actually leaving my restored comments untouched for now out of curiosity about what they'll do about it now that the issue is known. I think that will probably answer the question about whether this was accidental or intentional.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#233

Post by Glench »

Shaanie wrote: post #227
Glench wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally I'd love to have an upvote and subreddit filter. So "delete all comments except the ones on /r/askscience or the ones with above 100 upvotes".

Awesome feedback, I'm on it!

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#234

Post by justin66 »

boredumb wrote: post #14
mkaszkowiak wrote: post #4

Does this comply with GDPR?

I would like to say yes but, if it's a comment being restored containing personally identifiable information of the person that deleted it than I would say no. With that said I believe you need to have a formal request to remove PII and I have some doubts if deleting or obfuscating a reddit comment you made qualifies as such.

GDPR is principles-based regulation. No specific thing you mentioned actually matters, what matters is whether anyone's privacy rights will be violated by rolling back years worth of deletes or edits.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#235

Post by Eisenstein »

brookst wrote: post #201
tremon wrote: 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.

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

> Investors aren’t that dumb

Maybe not individually, but this is an IPO and the P stands for Public, and when you aggregate everyone together then intelligence is a moot concept.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#236

Post by freediverx »

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.

Except in this case, we have a proven bad faith actor with a pension for deceit and vindictive behavior.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#237

Post by Siecje »

How would you feel if the comments were restored but not associated to your account?

That way the discussion is still there for people in the diture to follow but someone can't go through your comment history to learn about your political view or wealth or whatever people look for.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#239

Post by Karunamon »

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…

If it was indeed a business decision, then Huffman is breathtakingly incompetent. To the degree that, were the company public, I would be agitating for the board to remove him as his actions negatively impact my investment.

A number of ways this could have been handled better in no particular order:

1. Give more than 30 days notice to third party app developers.

2. Mandate that third-party clients display advertising as delivered by the API and return telemetry.

3. Keep the API changes but exempt paying subscribers.

4. Refrain from making bad-faith lies about the developer of the most popular application, which he then had to disprove using call recordings, and then after that, don't try to play off your actions as misunderstandings or mistakes.

5. Don't lie about deliverables for years and years to the point where the community memes on you for your history of lying.

6. Don't fuck around in the production database to edit comments critical of you.

7. Be a little forthright for once.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#240

Post by xp84 »

mittermayr wrote: post #21

It can only be a matter of hours until someone releases the "ChatGPT rewrites your Reddit history" AI tool. URL coming up in 3...2...1....

I'm imagining the potential for fun prompt engineering:

"Post: xxxxx

Parent comment: xxxx

Consider the above post and parent comment. Write a a 50-word reply to that comment which is full of inaccurate information."

Post reply on HN