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Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

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Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#261

Post by eitland »

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…

If they have done this to an EU citizens I am fairly sure they have broken GDPR in some way or another.

For most users this isn't going to be a problem but my guess is there is a rather big chance for a number of the comments that were restored there were really good reason why they were deleted and now Reddit are responsible for them being online again.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#262

Post by brookst »

bombcar wrote: post #47
fabian2k wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Reddit posts are not personal data. Okay, you can probably get specific ones removed that way where you explicitly include personal data. But this doesn't mean that you have a right to delete all content you write anywhere.

It's a weird interaction with Section 230 if Reddit can say "these posts are not ours, they are the posters" and yet the poster cannot edit/delete them. Of course, HN itself kills your edit window after a certain time limit, so there is some legal way of doing it, I assume.

Section 230 does not talk about ownership.

A freight company is generally not liable for contraband shipped without its knowledge. That does not mean that all shipments become the property of the freight company. Same thing.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#263

Post by [deleted] »

Siecje wrote: post #237

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.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#264

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

This is basically spamming, but with a time delay so the moderators won’t see it.

Worse, the data is already archived by the data collection services. The people who suffer are going to be average users trying to find some answer to a question by searching Reddit, only to discover jumbled messes of words that don’t make sense.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#265

Post by jimktrains2 »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #219
littlestymaar wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 20gb dump doesn't include history afaik and probably doesn't include images and other multimedia.

I don't think it invalidates your point, but I just wanted to clarify.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#266

Post by donkeyd »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #264
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…

This is basically spamming, but with a time delay so the moderators won’t see it. Worse, the data is already archived by the data collection services. The people who suffer are going to be average users trying to find some answer to a question by searching Reddit, only to discover jumbled messes of words that don’t make sense.

> The people who suffer are going to be average users

I already notice this just with the blackout. Some stuff I find on Google is in private subs now, so I can't view it on Reddit. Sure, there might be ways around it, but regular people won't know that.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#267

Post by PragmaticPulp »

juujian wrote: post #79
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…

Also important to note that this is an indicator that Reddit has lost all trust from (this part of) the community. Even if that is a plausible explanations, many will not give Reddit's current management the benefit of doubt. I simply would not put it past Hoffman to be that petty that he would do it, he seems to be taking after Musk more and more lately. Wasted so much goodwill. That will be tough to navigate for th…

> Also important to note that this is an indicator that Reddit has lost all trust from (this part of) the community.

Assuming the worst, ignoring details that violate the narrative, and circulating ragebait without verification are all staples of mainstream Reddit content.

It’s not surprising that the Reddit outrage/grievance machine has turned on itself and is now assuming the worst and getting outraged at every turn.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#268

Post by ParetoOptimal »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #7

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?

Reddit feels more like a betrayal and more surprising than other big corps.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#269

Post by Eisenstein »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #219
littlestymaar wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If reddit had stuck to what it is good at: threaded, in-depth text conversations and links, it wouldn't need such a large amount of storage or bandwidth. Yes, I know that 1.7 billion users is a lot of text, but (1) there wouldn't be 1.7billion users if it were only text and links (2) the users who wouldn't be on reddit without multimedia offerings I am sure use a almost exclusively multimedia and account for the lions share.

Go back a few years, nix the 'let's host video and pictures and live chat and ignore every single thing the users are asking for so that we can bring in the eyeballs' idea and instead of that monetize the regulars using the their content and site's ability to guide google to it.

Keep 150,000,000 dedicated users who reliably generate valuable content for you and keep the site spam free for you, and all you have to do is keep some devs on hand to add tooling and site features that are useful. The caveat is that Stevey Huff has to live with one or two fewer commas on the balance in his bank account.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#270

Post by mrits »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #243

What is interesting is that reddit claimed they couldn't show mods deleted comments for "lawyercat" reasons[1]. Mods used to be able to check deleted comments for harassment via Pushshift. Has the legal calculus changed so much in the past month that reviving comments to the general public is now okay? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...

I don't see how GDPR can't force them to remove all comments? Additionally, there is no reason Europeans can't own multiple accounts and that accounts can't change hands. So a single European should be able to delete thousands of accounts?
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