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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

#381

Post by axegon_ »

The true issue here is that reddit by design NEVER deletes anything. Ever. It's only levels of visibility. In practice the 4 obvious levels are:

* Unregistered users: Public, non-age restricted content(whether that be as a subreddit requirement or post-specific thing).

* Registered users: same as above, minus content that was published by individual users and deleted afterwards, content removed by moderators or in more extreme cases reddit themselves(last one is a bit of a special case, I'll come to that part later).

* Moderators: they see everything that was posted by other users and subsequently removed by the moderators for whatever reason. If a user deletes their contribution personally, then moderators won't see it either.

* Content removed by reddit: visible by reddit employees, appears as "Removed by Reddit" to anyone else. In this particular instance, reddit may remove contents that was removed by moderators already.

I'm a moderator of 2 large subs and a few smaller ones. Luckily I developed a backup system, which effectively backs up everything that was ever published on the sub(plus a ton of other stuff, including image recognition, lightweight nlp and tracking what reddit removes. Without saying which subreddit I'm talking about, I can tell you that a lot more is happening in large communities(20+k people online at any given time) than you might think.

So in the case mentioned here, it's simply a case of some "status" field in some database that was flicked. Which is kind of concerning, given the amount of contents me and the other mods have removed. Truth be told, the moderation tools that reddit provide are rat shit. I ended up developing a ton of custom ones(completely nuking a specific user's history, chained comments or entire comment sections. Things, which reddit has been promosing for years but never delivered. Funny enough, all of those are a question of 30 lines of code in total, if we are talking about a single-script type of thing. But it is worrying that stuff like this happened. Just earlier today I used one of those scripts to nuke 300+ comments in a post. I also keep a backup of the mod log so in theory I could undo the damage. Question is, how long would that take. We are talking about 500k action we've collectively taken over the past year. Some through a script, plenty manually however.

Despite all the drama lately, I don't think that's a deliberate retaliation from reddit due to the blackout, more likely a "woops" moment that happened at a very inconvenient time for reddit.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#383

Post by crazygringo »

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.

That would easily explain comments coming back that were hours old or even days old, but it's extremely unlikely to explain comments coming back that were months or years old, as others in this thread have found.

No database shard would ever have been left that far out of date due to high load.

The only Hanlon's razor I can imagine here is somebody wrote a query to try to undelete something small (intending a single user or something) and forgot the WHERE clause and started to undelete everything. And didn't realize until the query had been executing for several minutes.

Yikes.

(I do actually think this is the most likely, not because of spez's motivations, but because there's zero benefit for Reddit here. It might make sense for them to force subreddits back to public, but undeleting old comments has no strategic value right now.)

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#384

Post by notacoward »

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.

I've worked on many eventually consistent systems, up to exascale at one of the companies you mention, and that explanation just seems extremely unlikely. In a system using tombstones, those should (and generally will) go the same place as the originals so "missing shard" doesn't work. Over that time scale there should then have been multiple rounds of compaction, including those forced by disk or server replacements, which would have also purged that deleted/overwritten data. Nobody at that scale can afford to let uncompacted garbage accumulate forever. Therefore, if not tombstones, they must be deliberately keeping old versions, but in that case the issue just moves to the index and doesn't really change much. The only way I can see this happening is if there was an unrecoverable data loss that required restoring from backup. Also, let's not forget that true deletion is sometimes required under various regulatory systems. I know that at least two of the companies you mention have systems specifically dedicated to satisfying those requirements.

It's still possible that this is innocent(ish), but at low enough probability that malice really does seem like a compelling alternative explanation. After all, spez has been caught doing something very similar before. There's proof of malicious nature, not just an assumption. When a component in a system has a certain known behavior or limit, you don't just discard that knowledge due to some handy rule of thumb.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#385

Post by 411111111111111 »

edgineer wrote: post #336

This reinforces the adage (that used to be true) "nothing gets deleted from the internet" and so I am for it. I hope useful posts will be un-404'd.

The adage means something very different though. It's about the fact that once you've posted it, someone will have made a screenshot or scrape of the content, which will resurface at the most inopportune times.

I.e what unddit.com did for reddit

What're reddit decided to do here is almost certainly against european law and I expect we'll hear more about it over the following months.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#386

Post by sdfghswe »

impomura wrote: post #349
6c696e7578 wrote: post #302

Obvious LOL. Stupid question, but did anyone ever /trust/ online social sites to do what they claimed when it came to managing user data?

IDK what's so fun about it man. We used to think that agreements between users and providers were binding. That they were stronger than good faith. US law is based on that, I think. Everything that's not based in Europe is fucked and it's not even remotely fun.

This behavior of "user says he wants to delete the data, company says it deleted it, but they actually haven't" has happened so many times just in my life time. What's so funny about it is that some people STILL haven't learned their lesson.

I learned the lesson the very first time I've seen it happen.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#387

Post by aprentic »

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…

Do you know if any of the "delete my reddit posts" apps support this?

Maybe even an option to keep it running and randomly update posts with GPT nonsense over time?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#388

Post by AlexandrB »

xwdv wrote: post #363
buildbot wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s user hostile to undelete information the original CREATOR of the information choose to delete. They don’t owe you anything.

Does Reddit owe them anything? Didn’t think so.

People delete posts for all kinds of reasons - including accidentally violating NDA, or posting NSFW pics you no longer want "out there". Undeleting this stuff is opening Pandora's Box.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#390

Post by popey »

popey wrote: post #37
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 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?

Ok, r/funny just went public, and one of my comments re-appeared in my profile. So I am confident that what's happening is the deletion of comments isn't happening on subreddits that are private (as r/funny was when I ran my delete script). As soon as the subreddit goes public, they "re-appear"
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