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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

#471

Post by saltminer »

bunga-bunga wrote: post #244
Karawebnetwork wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 info…

Why don’t you just use throwaways? I stopped reusing usernames online long long ago.

Lots of subreddits have minimum account age and/or karma requirements due to how bad the bot situation has gotten, so unless you're willing to farm karma and wait a month to post each time (or maintain multiple semi-permanent "burner" accounts, which, as pointed out by Maximus9000, can still be linked together by writing style), it's easier to just purge your comment history on a regular basis.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#472

Post by katbyte »

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…

> Checking just now

how did you check? profile page?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#473

Post by nebula8804 »

notacoward wrote: post #384
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…

Maybe I have this wrong but looking at academic torrents, the entire pushshift archive from 2005 to 2022 is 2TB compressed. Are they really operating at a massive scale that you are describing? Pushshift is supposed to have ingested all of Reddit's comment data no?

(Of course this is assuming pushsift has gotten the majority of comments)

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#474

Post by Eisenstein »

randomdata wrote: post #461
Eisenstein wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This person is either really playing up their Ayn Randian philosophy or they are deluded. I think you can be somewhat relieved knowing that the comments which are deleted are probably in line with the ones made by the person today -- worthless.

Absolutely they would be worthless to others. After all, if there was value available to others, others would be willing to pay for it. And that's just not going to happen for anything I am capable of writing. There is good reason why I'm the one paying for it even though it is quite common to pay others for what they write. It is not unusual at all to pay those skilled in writing for their work. For the rest of us,…

Money is just a convenient way to keep track of debt. Stop making it into some kind of proxy for all human need and utility.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#475

Post by fho »

crazygringo wrote: post #398
fho wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (I do actually think this is the most likely, because there's zero benefit for Reddit here.) The obvious benefit would be to artificially keep interaction rates high by "grave robbing" old comments and accounts. "Nobody is ever going to notice, those accounts are long dead!"

What interaction rates? For what ends? The metrics you use to attract investment are things like monthly active users, and whether a comment was deleted after it was made doesn't affect that at all.

I was thinking pure "comments per second" numbers, ie how much users interact with reddit. No idea what's the right word for that.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#476

Post by ncallaway »

katbyte wrote: post #470
ncallaway wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how did you see/find the comments?

I checked my profile by visiting old.reddit.com/user/[username]/comments.

Then I used shreddit to edit/delete my comments, and kept viewing that page to confirm comments were being removed. I also picked a handful of comments and confirmed they appeared as “deleted/removed” in the threads in which they appeared.

When shreddit was done, I checked my profile comments list to confirm it was empty. I double checked 1 and 12 hours later in case there was some cacheing.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#477

Post by Tao3300 »

Pyramus wrote: post #165
Algent wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep I agree, if you posted on a specific subreddit this is already personal information about yourself. There is no way they are not violating GDPR if they deny a request to delete (but I guess they can block direct deletion in bad faith and tell you to submit a direct request).

I'm not saying the content of a post can not be personal data. I'm saying it is not by default. The words "Hello world" posted on any subreddit is not personal data. In this case the company could simply delete the information relating to you such as user name, IP etc. The content you post is not, in general, personal data. It certainly can be.

That's kind of funny, because "Hello World" gives a strong indication of your profession and interests. Not enough on its own to be PII, but a useful data point.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#478

Post by randomdata »

Eisenstein wrote: post #474
randomdata wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely they would be worthless to others. After all, if there was value available to others, others would be willing to pay for it. And that's just not going to happen for anything I am capable of writing. There is good reason why I'm the one paying for it even though it is quite common to pay others for what they write. It is not unusual at all to pay those skilled in writing for their work. For the rest of us,…

Money is just a convenient way to keep track of debt. Stop making it into some kind of proxy for all human need and utility.

I said nothing of money?

Although, of course, what you say about money is true. In fact, I can see from my not deleted HN history that I wrote that money is just an IOU only three days ago. I guess there is some value in being able to look back on my work! But is it value enough?

Human nature is to be transactional. If I offer you my time to write a comment for you, I am going to expect something in return. That in return could be nothing more than the smile you give me when you read it. It doesn't have to be some elaborate, grandiose thing, but there has to be some kind of payment or one will quickly sour to the ordeal.

If I were to write for you now, what would you give me in return? I suspect nothing because there is nothing of value I could offer you with my writing. Conversely, I offer you nothing. Will you write something for me? I expect not. Why would you?

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#479

Post by _zoltan_ »

eq88 wrote: post #311

With how quickly Reddit and Twitter have destroyed their reputations, it almost feels like it's been intentional to bring down our giant public communication platforms as we enter a new age of misinformation.

Twitter is alive and well, thank you.

Re: Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

#480

Post by Tao3300 »

rcxdude wrote: post #73
nottorp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

For a while it seemed that while this was true, edits were at least destructive: so a lot of mass-deletion tools would edit the comments, then optionally delete them. But I wouldn't be surprised if this is no longer the case (TBH, making the edit history of comments public is a good idea in general).

I disagree. Making edit history public would turn the discussion into a total shitshow. Reddit would drown in stuff like: "I see from your second edit you said ... so clearly you're a ignoramus and a bigot."
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