Reddit claiming they weren’t recovering deleted posts
I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
It doesn’t. A Reddit script just sends a request to delete the comment. At that point if the comment is deleted and then restored due to a timeout it is 100% on them.
It would be different if they would send back an error code without any changes being made, but the fact that the comment was first deleted is proof enough that their system received and at least started to process the call.
Reddit gives you the best of the internet in one place. Get a constantly updating feed of breaking news, fun stories, pics, memes, and videos just for you. Passionate about something niche? Reddit has thousands of vibrant communities with people that share your interests. Alternatively, find out what’s trending across all of Reddit on r/popular. Reddit is also anonymous so you can be yourself, with your Reddit profile and persona disconnected from your real-world identity.
If you ran those scripts while subreddits were dark, the script can’t see those comments you made in those particular subs, (they’re hidden along with the sub) and can’t delete them. Then later when the sub comes back to public mode, your comments will appear as well. So comments you thought you wiped were simply hiding.
Just to add, also check the other sections on your comments when deleting (eg: hot/controversial) because sometimes those ones get missed by the scripts as well.
Not to say that’s the only thing going on… wouldn’t surprise me if they are bringing back some stuff considering their history of shenannigans.
The issue is reddit doesn’t store all the data in one indexed and centralized location. It was pointed out that “hot” and “top” sorting aren’t just a sort, but literally TWO LISTS that are constantly being updated and adjusted. So if you remove a comment from one list or location, it still might exist in other places. Then when reddit software gets around to reconciling these differences, the copy that still exists gets pushed onto the other lists and returns.
I’m not trying to justify the system; it sucks and reddit is directly responsible for that. But it does seem like they’re no intentionally restoring content, it’s just a side effect of their bungled system.
Except that’s crap, because I have been manually deleting my Reddit comments weekly at minimum for years, and I’ve had several that repopulated a few weeks free being deleted.
Some of them have respawned more than once even.
So Reddit is entirely full of shit.
I’m a web developer, that is absolutely not how any of this works.
Their claim that the scripts are failing causing comments to be restored is not possible. When you make a request to a website the site returns a success or fail status. The scripts are getting success statuses, the users are manually checking and seeing that their posts are deleted and then they reappear later. This means there is a mechanism between step 2 and 3 being run by Reddit affecting an already completed action.
Don’t comment on stuff like this unless you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own databases is… inappropriate.
Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.
To be fair, I haven’t seen any of my deleted comments come back. What I have seen though, are things that could be confused for it:
Yeah I think people are looking for a conspiracy here when this seems like much more of a technical thing. I think the person that put together one of the scripts even acknowledged that comments being “restored” were because the script was bad and needed a delay of some kind? Because Reddit has safeguards against mass deletion or editing in this manner in the event of trolls or compromised accounts and so on.
Like, comments were never meant to be mass deleted in this fashion, and we don’t actually know exactly how reddit handles the requests on their end, so it makes sense some of them got kicked back automatically.
Reddit is doing more than enough terrible shit we can point to at the moment, don’t need to wind this particular thing up into something it isn’t.
I definitely do not believe any of these stories of comments intentionally restored. Not one piece of concrete proof of it happening has been submitted by anyone. It's definitely one of those "do your own research" things.
But also, Reddit is responsible for this situation by not having a first party tool for self-service full account deletions. They deserve all these conspiracies hitting them for omitting such an essential feature.
Demanding I prove a negative because countless people have never once proved a positive? That's pretty much the definition of conspiracy thinking.
These rumors of restored comments have been going on since the start of the reddit blackouts. And they're largely not happening anymore now that the blackouts are over. It was the blackouts. I checked my comments and deleted new ones almost every day during the blackouts, and whenever they "came back" they were all on a previously-private sub and they "came back" as a bloc. It was private subs having comments be private, then turning public/restricted and "restoring" the previously-inaccessible comments.
There is absolutely zero change Reddit would be restoring only certain comments. It would be widespread if they were doing it. They aren't going to send out one of the professional sitewide mods with admin tools to review deletions and randomly restore only certain comments.
Spot on. Even when they've been caught doing things most people thought was shady (e.g., last year's /r/place manipulation), they tend to not outright deny it, but rather admit it and offer a half-assed explanation and end the conversation at that.
They wouldn't do something that flagrantly disregards EU/CA privacy laws. If they did it, they'd have have a justification they thought would hold up in court. If they had a justification that held up in court, they'd happily plop it in a comment that's pinned with a few dozen rewards and ignore any responses after that.
Regarding PowerDeleteSuite it’s because it hasn’t been updated in multiple years and since then (like a year after the last PDS update) Reddit added a cooldown for editing comments. I assume the same exists for deleting.
So when you run the script, occasionally you hit the 5-sec cooldown but the script just keeps moving, thinking everything is okay.
Regarding PowerDeleteSuite it’s because it hasn’t been updated in multiple years
It’s not really that. Reddit just doesn’t expose more comments through its API, so there’s nothing PowerDeleteSuite can do. You have to use other tools to get at those shadow comments. The most reliable way is to do a GDPR data request, and then feed the results through the free shreddit tool: github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
Yes, it matters hugely.
Let's say I do a google search for "how to frobitz a widget" and the top result (because as you say it's in Google's cache) points me to a post on /r/WidgetFrobitzing.
I then click through and find that the post is deleted or has been changed to say "lol Spez sucks use Lemmy" or whatever. I'll almost certainly close that tab and go back to google to find another link. That deprives Reddit of clicks through its ads, of time spent on site, and it also means that user is less likely to follow links to Reddit in future as they will know they're not as useful as Google thought they were.
Oh, I swear I read through those docs before and didn’t see that feature. Well that’s cool.
I ended up writing my own shitty little script bc I couldn’t find an existing one. Glad it’s out there.
Oh, I swear I read through those docs before and didn’t see that feature. Well that’s cool.
I ended up writing my own shitty little script bc I couldn’t find an existing one. Glad it’s out there.
You feel that? You feel it slipping?
When you have to be this hands on with your site, manipulating it, it just means your circling the drain… slowly working your way down.
It’s going to get exhausting putting out these little fires constantly. If only they had a group of people that would happily do the moderation for them… for free.
But why even acknowledge it if you’re just going to lie about it. Cringe.
I got the exact same answer.
I kept all my communications with them and I still have to legally wait untill july 28th to report them to my national competent authority.
If it isn’t on purpose, then they have a bug that is restoring comments. My main account is 18 years old. Cake Day is December 2005. I deleted it all, and then I checked from multiple devices to ensure when I logged in it was all gone, and it was. Until it wasn’t. I had about 100 random comments from 2013 to 2022 come back. So I manually deleted them all… again. And then a few days later, suddenly different comments are back. I must have repeated this deletion process 4-5 times. Each time, Reddit’s interface (not a third party script or app) showed me everything was gone… until it wasn’t.
They have some automated recovery going on whether they want to admit it or not.
I’d have to dig around for it, but I remember someone posting on here that reddit was restoring their comments. Then they found out that the comments they claimed reddit restored were actually in a privatized subreddit that opened back up. The script they were running to delete comments couldn’t because it didn’t have access to the comments to delete them.
Reddit is doing a lot of shady shit but I don’t feel like this is one of them.
Keep pushing with the relevant authorities. There is a difference between “We are not intentionally restoring comments” and “We certify that we have forgotten all of your info”, and that’s what these authorities enforce.
It doesn’t matter if Reddit’s inscrutable back end makes it difficult. That’s Reddit’s problem, not yours. If they want to do business in the EU, they either have to do it or pull a Meta and stop serving EU residents entirely.
I wrote my own script to delete comments and it seemed like Reddit’s comment views were broken. I had to go back and forth between the different views (top, new, etc), as I’d clear out one, go to a different view and see stuff was still there. It seemed like there would be comments lost in the ether which I would never be able to efficiently delete for this reason.
If I remember correctly, top seemed to be the best sort method for deleting, while also the least desirable. Ultimately, I was going to delete everything, but I did think about leaving some of my highest upvoted comments, I’d they were actually helpful and not just a stupid joke. But when the other sort methods were so flakey, I had to just nuke from the top.
When the ICO recieve a complaint they usually send an initial notification email to the data controller explaining that a complaint has made and that a case officer will be assigned in due course.
Well, unless it relates to a serious or ongoing data breach, which tends to be triaged immediately into an active investigation. Initial notification letters do also recommend trying to resolve the issue with the data subject in the interim though.
That probably spooked Reddit into moving your case up the priority list as I imagine they’ve got a pretty substantial backlog of SARs and other data rights requests, considering the circumstances.
The response window for most of those rights is also 30 calendar days + extensions if applicable, so they could also have just been responding as late as allowed, accounting for aforementioned probable backlog.
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